{"id":207,"date":"2018-04-26T15:51:36","date_gmt":"2018-04-26T15:51:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sugata.in\/?p=207"},"modified":"2018-04-29T03:39:28","modified_gmt":"2018-04-29T03:39:28","slug":"python-basics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sugata.in\/index.php\/2018\/04\/26\/python-basics\/","title":{"rendered":"Python Basics"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently learned and started using Python for some of my projects. Python is a high level programming language with a number of pre-programmed packages for a variety of useful tasks. Tasks I’ve used Python for include scraping the web for data (excellent!), machine learning (meh … but that’s more my fault than Python’s), OCR (super meh), and algorithmic name classification, such as gender determination (again, excellent!).<\/p>\n

While I will not provide direct code to perform predictive analysis using Python, I will use this post to link to a variety of resources that I have used, along with how I use it.<\/p>\n

First, how to get started with Python. I use Jupyter Notebook, along with Anaconda. Both of these are installed when you download and install the latest version of Anaconda – google “download jupyter notebook” and go to the first link<\/a>. The actual download will be from the Anaconda website<\/a>.\u00a0 As of posting, the latest version is Python 3.6. Click “Download,” run the file and choose all the default options and install Python and Jupyter Notebook.<\/p>\n

Jupyter Notebook runs inside your browser. Open up Jupyter Notebook, create a folder for coding, and then create a new Notebook. Each Notebook has distinct cells for distinct blocks of code that can be run separately. Once you run the code in a cell, the output is produced right below. Here is an example:<\/p>\n

\"Capture2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As you can see, when you run each cell, it simply generates the output right below. One thing I wanted to point out is that variables and variable types are generated dynamically. the code “a=1” first defined a as an integer and then sets it to two. Printing (and other functions) can be applied to integers (e.g. “print(a)”) or strings (e.g. print(‘hello world’)) but not to a mix (see the error in the second cell).<\/p>\n

The second thing (and I love this) is the indentation is part of the language.<\/p>\n

if 3>2:<\/p>\n

print(‘hi’)
\nprint(‘there’)<\/p>\n

will return<\/p>\n

hi
\nthere<\/p>\n

if 3<2:<\/p>\n

print(‘hi’)
\nprint(‘there’)<\/p>\n

will return nothing<\/p>\n

but<\/p>\n

if 3<2:<\/p>\n

print(‘hi’)<\/p>\n

print(‘there’)<\/p>\n

will return<\/p>\n

there<\/p>\n

The indentation controls what is run in the “if” statement. This forces discipline in generating readable (and workable) code.<\/p>\n

Once you’ve gotten Python up and running – you’ll need additional packages to do\u00a0other code.<\/p>\n

For webscraping, I’d recommend selenium and chromedriver.<\/p>\n

For OCR, I’d recommend Tesseract (Google’s OCR).<\/p>\n

For machine learning, I use (but don’t know enough to recommend) tensorflow.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently learned and started using Python for some of my projects. Python is a high level programming language with a number of pre-programmed packages for a variety of useful tasks. Tasks I’ve used Python for include scraping the web for data (excellent!), machine learning (meh … but that’s more my fault than Python’s), OCR […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sugata.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sugata.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sugata.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sugata.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sugata.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.sugata.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212,"href":"http:\/\/www.sugata.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions\/212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sugata.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sugata.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sugata.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}