Modern Python Projects Transcripts
Chapter: Writing code
Lecture: PEP8 and PEP257
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The best place to learn the fundamental rules on how to write your Python code is a document called pep 8, pep stands for Python enhancement proposal,
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and it's a document published on Python website, that introduces some changes to the Python language
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specification. All the new features that came to Python, where once proposed as a pep document,
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and when they got accepted, they became a part of Python. One of those Python enhancement proposals, Number 8, is the Style Guide for Python code.
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It was written by Guido von Rose, with the help of some other CPython core developers.
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It's a long document specifying all the aspects of writing Python code. For example, it tells you how many spaces you should use,
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what's the maximum line length, how to solve your import statements and so on. For each of those rules, you can also see some examples of good and bad
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code. In addition to Pep 8, we also have pep257. This document explains how to write the docstrings.
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So, the documentation for your code, there are a few simple rules that need to remember One set of rules is for docstrings that can fit in one line,
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and another set of rules is for docstrings that will take multiple lines. For example, the one line Docstrings should start and end with triple quotes.
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The closing quote should be on the same line as the opening one, and so on. Even if this is the first time you hear about those documents
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if you are using a code editor that offers you auto formatting,
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you are probably already following those rules anyway because that's the standard in the Python community So, unless you have a very good excuse,
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you should follow those rules. The only one common exception from those rules is the
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line length. Pep 8 recommends that you should not exceed 79 characters per line. But as our screens get bigger and bigger,
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I see that more and more projects move away from this limitation and increase the maximum length upto 120 characters and even more.