30 Python Language Features and Tricks You May Not Know About

Abstraction: Catalog of Python idioms covering unpacking, collections, and itertools

Key points:

• Unpacking tricks: tuple assignment swap (a, b = b, a), extended unpacking with star (a, *b, c = [...]) in Python 3, named slices via slice()
• collections module: namedtuple (inheritable), Counter for multisets and most-common queries, deque with maxlen for sliding windows, defaultdict for auto-initialized trees
• itertools toolkit: product for Cartesian products, combinations, permutations, chain.from_iterable for flattening, groupby for keyed aggregation
• Generator expressions are lazy and composable; dictionary comprehensions invert or transform dicts concisely
• Sliding n-grams via zip with offset iterators: zip(*(islice(a, i, None) for i in range(n)))
• heapq.nlargest and heapq.nsmallest efficiently find top-k elements without full sort

Connections: Python Programming · Functional Programming

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