def iterate(f, x, condition):
	while condition(x):
		yield x
		x = f(x)

king salmon fucked around with this message at 05:15 on Jul 25, 2014

{'Collie': [{'Name': 'Sparky', 'Adopted': False}]}

{'Collie': [('Sparky', False)]}

from collections import defaultdict, namedtuple

AdoptionInfo = namedtuple('AdoptionInfo', ('name', 'adopted'))

breeds = defaultdict(list)

for breed, adoption_info in query_result:
    breeds[breed].append(AdoptionInfo(adoption_info['Name'], adoption_info['Adopted']))

SurgicalOntologist fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jul 25, 2014

SurgicalOntologist fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Jul 28, 2014

• Prefer snake_case over camelCase
  
• Be consistent with your use of single or double quotation marks. No one really cares which you use, but you should pick one and stick with it. The only exception is docstrings for functions; most agree that those look nicer when they're always double quotation marks.
  
• Most of the time, developers and libraries only care about __version__, and rarely, __author__. You can omit the rest.
  
• Prefer using at most 2 line break after different blocks of code. You use 3 after your first function. It's debatable whether 3 line breaks are okay to separate very distinct sections, like between imports and your first function. I do it sometimes but usually stick with 2.
  
• Use the requests library, it will not only handle UTF-8 for you but is superior to the standard lib's HTTP modules in every way. You can change retrieveLink's (or preferably retrieve_link's) body to "return requests.get(url).text"
  
• Don't feel bad about chaining function calls or method calls, as long as the line still remains 79 characters or less.
  
• If you want to strip all whitespace characters (spaces, tabs, newlines, etc.) before and after a string, use " string ".strip() instead of .replace(). If you really want to remove newlines from anywhere inside a string, you have it right. Not sure which you intended.
  
• Prefer string formatting ("%s" or "{}".format()) over concatenation. In your case since you're just concatenating some things at the end, it doesn't really matter either way.
  
• Prefer str.index() over str.find(). str.index() raises an exception when it can't find something and str.find() just returns -1. You generally want your functions to throw exceptions when they fail.
  
• Prefer regex over multiple string finds and indices. You can replace all your lines that build up video_id with a single re.search() call, for example. Regex is overkill in many cases but this is a good case to use it when compared to str.find()/str.index(). In a case like this it's best not to use substring finding + indexing at all.
  
• When trying to parse HTML, you usually want to use a full HTML parser. The better alternative to substring finding or regexes in this case is to use an HTML parser. I recommend BeautifulSoup with lxml, or just plain lxml.
  

Zarithas fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jul 30, 2014

animal = "cat"

print "My %s is a %s" % (animal, animal)

# Or

print "My {0} is a {0}.format(animal)

d = {"color": "red", "age": 25}

print "My favorite color is {color} and I am {age} years old".format(**d)

Zarithas fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Jul 30, 2014

• I used two blank lines before functions because I thought that's what the PEP8 spec said I should do. I've seen that sort of style used elsewhere, and while I agree with you that two new lines might not be necessary, I thought it'd be better to be PEP8 compliant than stubborn. (looking up the blank line section lead me to realize/eliminate blank lines within my functions, though, so that's good)
  
• Admittedly my use of urllib2 is vestigial from when I was first learning how to do things in this language. This whole project is sort of my first, and I've been more or less reiterating through it to fix things or make them more pythonic or whatever. I'll look into requests though, it definitely seems easier.
  
• I feel like I'm using replace correctly here. I need to replace "&" with "and", and spaces with plus signs, and eliminate newlines (which you said replace is fine for)
  
• I didn't think of using a full HTML parser because I only need a very small portion of the HTML. I do use the HTMLParser package in another portion of the file, so I'll look into those things you suggested.