code snippets for n00bs

Here's an example how to remove a substring from a string. It utilizes the replace function of the Python string. str = 'something something <remove> something </removealso> yeah! <remove>' str = str.replace('<remove>', '') str = str.replace('</removealso>', '') print(str) You can do it also like this: str = 'something something <remove> something </removealso> yeah! <remove>' str = str.replace('<remove>', '').replace('</removealso>', '') print(str)

Here's some helpful functions for generating random integers in python. This has been tested on Python 2.7, but should work on newer Pythons also. Please comment if you run across any problems! First, you have to import the random library. import random If you don't have it already in your library, download random.py and place it in the same folder as your python script. The nice documentation for the random library can be found here . Now you can generate floating point (float) random numbers from 0.0 to 1.0 with the command random.random() If you're looking for a way to generate random integers, here's a couple of ready functions for you! # returns random integer from -variation to +variation def rando(variation):     return int(round((random.random()*2-1)*variation)) # random integer, from zero to maxval def randzv(maxval):     return int(round(random.random()*maxval)) # random integer, from minval to maxval def randminmax(minval, maxv...

Here's a code example showing how to create date & time strings. # first, we need to import the datetime module # in order to use date & time functions. import datetime # create and print string example #1 timestring = datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H%M") print(timestring) # create and print string example #2 timestring = datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m") print(timestring) # append a text to the end of string example #2 timestring = timestring + "-logfile.txt" print(timestring) Here's what the output will look like: 2013-03-27-1449 2013-03 2013-03-logfile.txt More info on how to format the datetime string can be found here . Hope this helps you!