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Adarsh Punj
Adarsh Punj

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πŸš€ 5 Python One-Liners You Should Know

Format JSON

cat file.json | python -m json.tool
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The | operator is a "pipe" between the two commands, hence the output of cat is sent to Python's json.tool

Save a string to a file

print("Hello, World!", file=open('file.txt', 'w')) 
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The default value of file is sys.out, which leads it to print to the console.

Hidden user input

import getpass

pwd = getpass.getpass("ENTER PASSWORD:" )
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getpass is a built-in Python library

Validate spellings [EN]

Let's see if the word "hello" is a valid English word.

if "hello".casefold() in open('/usr/share/dict/words/').read(): return True
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Most of the unix-based machines have a "words" file in the system that is basically the English dictionary with 200k+ words. We can check if the given word exists in the dictionary to validate the spelling. The name and location of this file might be different for you.

Start a quick, local server

python -m http.server 8000
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This starts a local server on port 8000 from the current working directory

Source: Snekletter; weekly code nuggets.

Top comments (1)

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raddevus profile image
raddevus

Wow! Just tried that last one on Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS with python3 and it worked great.
Thanks for sharing these valuable one-liners. They were very interesting.
I usually use $ http-server -p 8082 (nodejs http server) but this is a cool option using python.
If you get a chance, check out my latest article here on dev.to, Software Developer, Are You Just A Hammer? and let me know what you think.