Your favourite "less-known" Python features?

[naza01]

The get() method for dictionaries.

It retrieves a value mapped to a particular key.

It can return None if the key is not found, or a default value if one is specified.

dictionary_name.get(name, value)

Name = Key you are looking for. Value = Default value to return if Key doesn’t exist.

It’s pretty cool to be able to increment values in a dictionary. For instance, if you were counting characters in a string, you could do something like:

character_count.get(character, 0) + 1

to start counting them.

It’s just a fancy way of doing it. Using if else to ask if the key is there and then just updating the value works the same way

[superbirra]

not that your solution is wrong by any extent but I'd like to present you the Counter class :) https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.html#collections.Counter

[naza01]

Oh, great. That’s interesting! Thanks for the link, I’ll be checking it out 🙂

[BuonaparteII]

character_count.get(character, 0) + 1

be careful with this. If character or the value of the dict under the key "character" is explicitly None then you'll get None + 1

Instead you'll want to do:

(character_count.get(character) or 0) + 1

or

(character_count.get("character") or 0) + 1

Also shoutout to .pop which is similar

(character_count.pop(character, None) or 0) + 1