10 Basic Python Examples That Will Help You Learn Fast

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All basic Python examples were written for Python 3.x. We cannot guarantee that they’ll work on Python 2.x, but the concepts should be transferable.

Strings

Proper string manipulation is something that every Python programmer needs to learn. Strings are involved whether you’re doing web development, game development, data analysis, and more. There’s a right way and a wrong way to deal with strings in Python.

String Formatting

Let’s say you have two strings:

>>>name = "Joel"
>>>job = "Programmer"

And let’s say you want to concatenate (“join together”) the two strings into one. Most people might be inclined to do this:

>>>title = name + " the " + job
>>>title
>"Joel the Programmer"

But this isn’t considered Pythonic. There is a faster way to manipulate strings that results in more readable code. Prefer to use the format() method:

>>>title = "{} the {}".format(name, job)
>>>title
>"Joel the Programmer"

The {} is a placeholder that gets replaced by the parameters of the format() method in sequential order. The first {} gets replaced by the name parameter and the second {} gets replaced by the job parameter. You can have as many {}s and parameters as you want as long as the count matches.

What’s nice is that the parameters don’t have to be strings. They can be anything that can be represented as strings, so you could include an integer if you wish:

>>>age = 28
>>>title = "{} the {} of {} years".format(name, job, age)
>>>title
>"Joel the Programmer of 28 years" String Joining

Another nifty Pythonic trick is the join() method, which takes a list of strings and combines them into one string. Here’s an example:

>>>availability = ["Monday", "Wednesday", "Friday", "Saturday"]
>>>result = " - ".join(availability)
>>>result
>'Monday - Wednesday - Friday - Saturday'

The defined string is the separator that goes between each list item, and the separator is only inserted between two items (so you won’t have an extraneous one at the end). Using the join method is much faster than doing it by hand.

Conditionals

Programming would be pointless without conditional statements. Fortunately, conditionals in Python are clean and easy to wrap your head around. It almost feels like writing pseudocode. That’s how beautiful Python can be.

Boolean Values

Like in all other programming languages, comparison operators evaluate to a boolean result: either True or False . Here are all the comparison operators in Python:

>>>x = 10
>>>print(x == 10) # True
>>>print(x != 10) # False
>>>print(x <> 10) # False, same as != operator
>>>print(x > 5) # True
>>>print(x < 15) # True
>>>print(x >= 10) # True
>>>print(x <= 10) # True The isand not Operators

The == , != , and <> operators above are used to compare the values of two variables. If you want to check if two variables point to the same exact object, then you’ll need to use the is operator:

>>>a = [1,2,3]
>>>b = [1,2,3]
>>>c = a
>>>print(a == b) # True
&g