Raphaël Slinckx

Fun python snippets

Here is a short list of python WTF’s i often come across in my own code, debugging
those is quite hard..

Tuples are immutable ?

a = ([],[])

try:
# Modifying a tuple ?
a[0] += [1]
except:
pass

print a

Weird list references:

a = [[None]*4]*3
a[0][0] = 1

print a

Import madness:

* in mod1.py:
FOO=1

* in mod2.py:
import mod1
def set_foo(i):
mod1.FOO = i

* in mod3.py:
from mod1 import *
import mod2
mod2.set_foo(2)
print FOO

Run "python mod3.py"

Weird variable scoping:

* in mod1.py:
a = 3
def foo():
return a

if __name__ == "__main__":
for a in range(3):
print foo()

* in mod2.py
from mod1 import *
a = 6
print foo()

Compare "python mod1.py" and "python mod2.py"

Of course these snippets are a bit convoluted, but I often find these patterns appearing randomly..

How much of them have you got right without looking at the answer before?