A bit of Python basics. Day 2: merging dictionaries

If you have two dictionaries that need to be merged, this can be done in two simple ways. You can use the merge operator (|) or the operator (**). Below we have two dictionaries: first_dict and second_dict. We will use these two methods to merge the dictionaries. Here's the code:

1️⃣ Using the merge operator (|)

first_dict = {"kelly": 23,
              "Derick": 14, "John": 7}
second_dict = {"Ravi": 45, "Mpho": 67}

combined_dict = first_dict | second_dict
print(combined_dict)

Output:

{'kelly': 23, 'Derick': 14, 'John': 7, 'Ravi': 45, 'Mpho': 67}

2️⃣ Method 2: using the merge operator (**)

With this operator, you need to put the dictionaries inside curly braces. In the code below, we "substitute" two dictionaries for merging using two operators *. Both dictionaries are enclosed in curly braces and separated by a comma.

first_dict = {"kelly": 23,
              "Derick": 14, "John": 7}
second_dict = {"Ravi": 45, "Mpho": 67}

combined_dict = {**first_dict, **second_dict}
print(combined_dict)

Output:

{'kelly': 23, 'Derick': 14, 'John': 7, 'Ravi': 45, 'Mpho': 67>

👉 https://t.iss.one/DataScience4

A bit of basics. Day 3: Calendar in Python

There is a built-in module in Python called calendar. We can import this module to display the calendar. There are many things you can do with the calendar.

Let's say we want to see the calendar for April 2022. We use the month class from the calendar module and pass the year and month as arguments. See below:

import calendar

month = calendar.month(2022, 4)
print(month)

There are many other things you can do with calendar. For example, you can use it to check whether a given year is a leap year or not. Let's check if 2022 is a leap year.

import calendar

month = calendar.isleap(2022)
print(month)

False

👉 https://t.iss.one/DataScience4

A bit of Python basics. Day 4: Getting the current time and date

The code below shows how to get the current time using the datetime module. The now() method returns a datetime object representing the current date and time according to the system clock. The strftime() method formats the time for the desired output. This code shows how to use the datetime module together with the strftime() method to get a formatted time string in the format of hours, minutes, and seconds.

from datetime import datetime

time_now = datetime.now().strftime('%H:%M:%S')
print(f'Current time: {time_now}')

Current time: 17:37:28

What if we want to return today's date? We can use date from the datetime module. Below, the today() method is used:

from datetime import date

today_date = date.today()
print(today_date)

2023-09-20

👉 https://t.iss.one/DataScience4