7 Essential Python Features You Should Be Using More Often

1. List Comprehensions

List comprehensions offer a concise way to create lists. They are faster and more readable than traditional loops.

In [3]:

# Traditional way
squares = []
for x in range(10):
    squares.append(x**2)

# List comprehension
squares = [x**2 for x in range(10)]

2. Enumerate

Instead of manually tracking indexes when looping, enumerate allows you to access both the index and value of an iterable in a clean way.

names = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Charlie']
for index, name in enumerate(names, start=1):
    print(index, name)

1 Alice
2 Bob
3 Charlie

3. Unpacking

Python’s multiple assignment and unpacking features make variable assignments cleaner, especially with tuples and lists.

a, b = 5, 10
first, *middle, last = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]