It’s always fun when you stumble across something in your programming toolkit that you had never noticed. Here are three things I’ve recently enjoyed learning.

• Ternary syntax

  a = int(raw_input())
  is_even = True if a % 0 == 0 else False

• Enumerate

I’ve been looping over the length of my list, all these years, like a chump. It turns out you can do this:

for index, item in enumerate(some_list):
    # now the index of each item is available as well as the item    

# Don't do do this
for index in range(len(some_list)):
    item = some_list[index]

• for… else

Every so often, you really need to know that a for loop has run to completion. That’s what for…else is for!

for item in iterable:
    if item % 0 == 0:
       first_even_number = item
else:
    raise ValueError('No even numbers')