When working with structured data in Python, we often need to compare two dictionaries, JSONs, or complex objects to find out what has changed. While direct comparison (==) is useful, sometimes we need to understand exactly what is different: which keys were added, which were removed, or where values have changed …

Have you ever needed to take screenshots of a web page programmatically? Perhaps to document your project, monitor UI changes, or generate images for social media. There are many ways to do it, but shot-scraper stands out for its ease of use and power.

Created by Simon Willison, shot-scraper is …

Discover how the Pandas Styler object allows you to apply conditional formatting and CSS styles to your DataFrames for better data visualization and presentation.

Learn how to configure Python's logging module to avoid message overload from third-party libraries, keeping your logs clean and useful.

Discover how Poe the Poet allows you to define and execute custom commands directly from your pyproject.toml, optimizing your workflow in uv environments.

HTTPX emerges as the natural successor to requests, offering async support, HTTP/2, and a modern API for contemporary Python applications.

Techniques in Python to create generators that can be iterated multiple times, overcoming the "one-shot" limitation of standard generators

Let's use threads in python to periodically execute a function

As I said, Google announced the closure of Google Code.

Today I received the email notifying me (I had a test project hosted there) that I could move my projects simply to github, the de facto repository for free software today (sorry for bitbucket and especially for mercurial).

Its interface …

I am writing again.

To force a django view to be called only via AJAX calls.

def ajax_required(f):
    """
    AJAX request required decorator
    use it in your views:

    @ajax_required
    def my_view(request):
        ....

    """
    def wrap(request, *args, **kwargs):
        if not request.is_ajax():
            return HttpResponseBadRequest()
        return f(request, *args, **kwargs)
    wrap.__doc__ = f.__doc__
    wrap.__name__ …

FileFields in Django need an upload_to function that determines where the file will be uploaded. I usually have a generic function in utils.py that leaves them in a subfolder with the model name.

import os

def generic_upload_to(instance, filename):
    """
    Generic `upload_to` function for models.FileField and models.ImageField
    which …

In my projects I usually use links to related items in the admin change_list.

from django.contrib import admin
from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType
from django.core import urlresolvers
from django.utils.datastructures import SortedDict …

I usually use this at the beginning of projects.

from django.conf import settings as django_settings
from django.core.exceptions import ImproperlyConfigured


def settings(request):
    """
    Adds the settings specified in settings.TEMPLATE_VISIBLE_SETTINGS to
    the request context.
    """
    new_settings = {}
    for attr in django_settings.TEMPLATE_VISIBLE_SETTINGS:
        try:
            new_settings[attr] = getattr(django_settings, attr)
        except AttributeError …