It is perhaps to not much of a surprise that in the developer community, Python is considered as one of the most popular programming languages of all time. The popularity of the language is often attributed to its versatile nature along with the humongous collection of Python libraries that allows developers to pick their favourites.
In this article, we shed light on some of the lucky-find libraries worth every developer’s time!
Black
An important aspect of coding is the format. Programmes small in size are easier to understand and as the complexity increases, it keeps getting difficult to understand even for the coders. To write the code in a readable, easy-to-understand format, ‘Black’ comes to the rescue. It ensures quality code through automated formatting.
Apart from reporting formatting errors, Black also fixes them. It can also be integrated with Vim, Emacs, VSCode, Atom or GIT.
Here’s the link to the GitHub repository.
Camelot
Extracting crucial data tables from PDFs is difficult but an even bigger problem lingers with the huge amount of data available in PDF files.
This is where ‘Camelot’—an open source versatile library—helps in extracting information without compromising the quality. It comes packaged with a command-line interface and is built on pdfminer, another text extraction tool for PDFs.
Here’s the link to the GitHub repository.
Colorama
The Colorama package methodically prints coloured text in Python. It only supports the 16-colours scheme and prepares the ANSI Escape sequences to produce the text. On Windows, Colorama strips these ANSI characters from stdout and converts them into equivalent win32 calls.
Here’s the link to the Github repository.
Livepython
Livepython lets coders visually track execution of their Python programmes. It traces changes in variables as they run the programme. The alpha software is meant to provide an insight into a given programme’s execution flow and highlights the lines as they are being executed. It contains three main components—a Python tracer, an Electron app along with a node.js gateway script to manage communication.
Here’s the link to the GitHub repository.
Ftfy (Fixes Text For You)
Designed by Robyn Speer, ftfy fixes broken text in Unicode. This works differently than turning non-Unicode into Unicode.
Ftfy has the ability to fix encoding mistakes, commonly known as ‘mojibake’, as it detects character patterns meant to be UTF-8. Currently, it uses Twitter’s streaming API as a source of realistic sample data and works in Python 2.7, Python 3.2, or later versions.
Here’s the link to the GitHub repository.
Git-story
Using a single command, Git-story generates mp4 videos presenting the layout and progression of the Git commit history. It helps developers visualise aspects of their code projects. This is especially true for version control systems like Git, where understanding the team’s workflow is a priority.
Here’s the link to the GitHub repository.
Rebound
This command-line tool fetches Stack Overflow results when an exception is thrown at the developers. All one needs to do is use the rebound command to execute the files. Built on Urwid, Rebound works on MacOS, Linux, and Windows. To scrape content from Stack Overflow content and sub-process errors, the tool uses Beautiful Soup.
Here’s the link to the GitHub repository.
Icecream
Bugs are a developer’s worst nightmare. Using print() to understand the pipeline’s flow and spot errors is the most common method among developers. There are several reasons why ic(), or Icecream package, is better. Firstly, it prints variable names as well as the values and it is 40% faster. Furthermore, the output is highlighted.
Here’s the link to the GitHub repository.
Isort
In Django projects—especially in views where a great amount of imports are dealt with—‘Isort’ is extremely useful. It automatically organises the imports and aligns them in sections by type. This Python library provides a command line utility as well as plugins for various editors. It requires Python 3.8+ to run but also supports formatting Python 2 code.
Here’s the link to the GitHub repository.
Manim
With 13k stars on Github, Manim enables creating animations for mathematical concepts using Python. Note that there are two versions currently; one created by Grant and the other is forked and maintained by the Manim Community.
Here’s the link to the GitHub repository.
