tools – Code Notes

Could regex’s days be numbered?

Regex lets us find anything, check for patterns, format accurately — and drives us crazy with anxiety and deepest discomfort. Regex stands for regular expressions, and my fave regex editor for Python is Pythex (I could not possibly write regex without it).

But there’s hope for the future! Check out Rosie and the Rosie Pattern Language (RPL) for Python!

I watched this video (the whole thing) and it just made me feel so happy. Oh, and Rosie works with other languages too!

This post will help me remember “What was that thing I heard about that can replace regex?” when I need to.

SMS and Google Sheets with Python

Student presentations in my advanced class are usually very interesting, and we all learn about new libraries and tools.

This week, Ryan S. showed an app that a soon-to-be-married fellow built to manage invitations and RSVPs for his wedding (read about the app).

“Sending an SMS or MMS is one of the most common tasks performed on the Twilio Platform” (see example).

The Twilio API is quite a Swiss Army Knife for making phone calls and sending/receiving SMS messages! Read more about SMS and Twilio.

The Python-happy groom also used gspread, a Python client library for the Google Sheets API (docs and GitHub).

Just another demonstration that you can do anything with Python!

Jupyter Notebooks

To install: Install (instructions at jupyter.org). Note that pip or pip3 install works. It’s on that page, after the Anaconda part.

You do not have to use Anaconda, which installs a lot of extra things.

You can install into a virtualenv.

After installing (with virtualenv activated, if you installed it that way), in Terminal, at bash prompt:

jupyter notebook

On Mac OS and Chrome, a new browser tab opens automatically, and you’re in the same folder where you were in the Terminal. If you have someone else’s notebook or a folder full of notebooks, you can toss them into that folder using Finder, just like any files.

Above: Two folders and one notebook file. Below: A notebook, open for work.

Create a new notebook file: The New button is on the far right side.

The thing I find hard to remember: You have to press Shift-Return to run the code in one of the boxes, or to save markdown you wrote. On the Cell menu, there’s an option to Run All.

Menus and icons: Very self-explanatory. Explore them.

File menu: “Revert to checkpoint” lets you roll back to the previous save.

File menu: “Close and Halt.” Saves the current notebook file and closes it.

To quit Jupyter, go to the Terminal and Control-C (not Command).