Addition of specific example of great code from one of the listed repositories.

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#995 opened on Apr 10, 2019 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty: 2/5
Estimated time: 1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness: 42/100

Issue type: Documentation
Clarity: Mostly clear
Activity status: Stale
Tech stack: python
Domain: documentation

Research direction

Start with the Reading Code section and the linked howdoi/howdoi.py example. Draft a formal explanation of the Python 2/3 import handling, control flow, and consistent API described in the issue, then add it to the appropriate page. Done means the example and its pedagogical takeaways are included in a pull request.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I absolutely love the Reading Code section, and I've been going through some of the repositories and identifying specific examples of why the code is good.

I was hoping to add one such example to the page. Specifically, from howdoi. It's virtually at the top of the codebase and it deals with standardizing the repository for Python 2 and 3.

https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi/blob/master/howdoi/howdoi.py

# Handle imports for Python 2 and 3
if sys.version < '3':
    import codecs
    from urllib import quote as url_quote
    from urllib import getproxies

    # Handling Unicode: http://stackoverflow.com/a/6633040/305414
    def u(x):
        return codecs.unicode_escape_decode(x)[0]
else:
    from urllib.request import getproxies
    from urllib.parse import quote as url_quote

    def u(x):
        return x

I think that there are two (and a half) key pedagogical takeaways from this.

The half takeaway is that supporting different versions of Python need not be a grueling task.

The remaining two are -

Appropriate use of control flow for module imports and function creation
Standardizing an API so that its source is indistinguishable to the rest of the code and functionality is consistent.

I haven't formally written this up yet, but if you think it would be a useful example, I can do that and submit a pull request.

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