This Week I Learned: 2022W31

Python - Pydantic

Pydantic will coerce values by default (an integer value will be coerced to a string attribute without validation error). If you don’t want this behavior you can use Strict Types.

Python - Dictionaries

If you want to set a default value to a dictionary key if it doesn’t exist, you can use setdefault.

my_dict = {'country': 'France', 'city': 'Paris'}

my_dict.setdefault('language', 'French')

# {
#     'country': 'France',
#     'city': 'Paris',
#     'lanugage': 'French'
# }
my_dict

Quite useful for default configuration, as it’s used here in the requests library.

Python - OOP - Caching

You can use the @functools.cached_property decorator instead of @property if you want a class virtual property to be computed only once.

from functools import cached_property
from time import sleep

class Foo:
    bar = 33
    baz = 4

    @cached_property
    def something_expensive(self):
        sleep(1)

        return self.bar + self.baz

foo = Foo()

# Takes 1 second
foo.something_expensive

# Is immediate, because it's been called
# on the same instance already
foo.something_expensive

Found it in my friend Olivier’s code :)

Python - Zip

Since Python 3.10, zip accepts a strict keyword argument if you want it to throw an exception in case of two iterables of different length. See PEP 618.

Python - Typehints

Since Python 3.9 you don’t need to import the corresponding typing types if you want to declare the shape of an iterable.

Before 3.9:

from typing import Dict

def foo(x: Dict[str, bool]) -> None:
    pass

From 3.9:

def foo(x: dict[str, bool]) -> None:
    pass

Python - Poetry

If you want to use a private repository (and not the official PyPI one) when installing a package with poetry, you can add this into your pyproject.yaml (here for the test PyPI repository):

[[tool.poetry.source]]
name = "testpypi"
url = "https://test.pypi.org/simple/"

Python - PyPI - Poetry

When using poetry, if you want to publish a package on the test PyPI repository, you have to use this address: https://test.pypi.org/legacy/ If you want to download/use a package from this same repository you have to use https://test.pypi.org/simple/.

I still don’t understand why. The simple one only works for downloads, and the legacy one only works for uploads. It’s very confusing and not documented.

But again, it just confirms to me that PyPI is really far behind compared to other repositories like packagist or npmjs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Python - Pip

If you created your package and published it on the test PyPI instance, and that package has a real world dependency, then installing it with pip could be really hard.

For example my package was requiring requests:^2.28.1. But on the test instance, the last release is 2.5.4.1 (whatever this number means…).

If I try to install my package from the test instance with pip:

python -m pip install --index-url https://test.pypi.org/simple einenlum-weather-project

I get :

ERROR: Cannot install einenlum-weather-project==0.1.1 and einenlum-weather-project==0.1.2 because these package versions have conflicting dependencies.

The conflict is caused by:
    einenlum-weather-project 0.1.2 depends on requests<3.0.0 and >=2.28.1
    einenlum-weather-project 0.1.1 depends on requests<3.0.0 and >=2.28.1

It took time for me to realize it’s because it tries to install requests:^2.28.1 from the test instance (which doesn’t exist).

The workaround is to first install requests manually (so I guess I have to do it for every of my dependencies…):

python -m pip install requests==2.28.1

And then to install again my package:

python -m pip install --index-url https://test.pypi.org/simple einenlum-weather-project
Looking in indexes: https://test.pypi.org/simple
Collecting einenlum-weather-project
  Downloading https://test-files.pythonhosted.org/packages/05/c0/eb3bf1887a33c4b8f938771e1842213302b1b72dd9f12621320a3f645f1b/einenlum_weather_project-0.1.2-py3-none-any.whl (3.1 kB)
Requirement already satisfied: requests<3.0.0,>=2.28.1 in ./.venv/lib/python3.10/site-packages (from einenlum-weather-project) (2.28.1)
Requirement already satisfied: idna<4,>=2.5 in ./.venv/lib/python3.10/site-packages (from requests<3.0.0,>=2.28.1->einenlum-weather-project) (3.3)
Requirement already satisfied: charset-normalizer<3,>=2 in ./.venv/lib/python3.10/site-packages (from requests<3.0.0,>=2.28.1->einenlum-weather-project) (2.1.0)
Requirement already satisfied: urllib3<1.27,>=1.21.1 in ./.venv/lib/python3.10/site-packages (from requests<3.0.0,>=2.28.1->einenlum-weather-project) (1.26.11)
Requirement already satisfied: certifi>=2017.4.17 in ./.venv/lib/python3.10/site-packages (from requests<3.0.0,>=2.28.1->einenlum-weather-project) (2022.6.15)
Installing collected packages: einenlum-weather-project
Successfully installed einenlum-weather-project-0.1.2

On the other hand with poetry it works without this trick. Seems like it fallbacks to the default PyPI repository if it can’t find the dependency in your private repository.

Again, really surprised by the behavior of pip and that it’s still the default dependency manager for Python.

CSS - Fonts

Fonts can be big and you don’t use the whole range of characters present in the files.

Glyphhanger is a tool to remove all the characters that are not used on your website to provide a lighter woff version with only the characters you use.

Didn’t try it yet, but it sounds interesting.