Lambda expressions are a way to quickly create anonymous functions in Python. An anonymous function is like a one time use function that doesn’t have a name. You simply use it one time and then move on in the program. Lambda functions are typically used in combination with map() and filter(). The lambda function approach makes it convenient to quickly define a function in a shorthand form that can be used with these functions.…
A useful higher-order function you can make use of in Python is the map() function. A higher-order function takes a function and a set of data values as arguments. The function which you pass in is applied to each data value, and a set of results or a single data value is returned. The purpose of a higher-order function is to make it easy to apply an operation to many different data elements.…
The type() function is a great tool to have when working with programs in Python. Everything in Python is an object, but there are many different types of objects available. There are string objects, function objects, integer objects, float objects, and boolean objects. It is useful to understand the type of an object when writing a Python script or during debugging. The function type() takes in an object as input and returns the data type of a given object.…
The len() function in Python is super convenient and one that you will use all the time when making programs. The input to len() is either a sequence or a collection and it returns the length when the function is called. You can use len() to get the length of anything you want in Python. For example, it can be used with strings, lists, tuples, and dictionaries.…
The built-in Python sum() function is another powerful tool anytime you’re working with numerical data in Python. The first argument to the sum() function should be a collection of numbers that you would like to add up. These numerical values can be contained within a list, tuple, set, or dictionary. The optional second parameter to use with the sum() function is the ‘start’ parameter. This adds a numeric value to the final result.…
A powerful built-in Python function that is great for working with sequences of data is the function sorted(). This function takes in a sequence as the mandatory input and can also take in an optional second keyword argument named reverse. The ‘reverse’ argument can be set to either ‘True’ or ‘False’. If it is not specified in the function call, ‘reverse’ is set to False by default meaning ascending order is used during the sort operation.…
Another built-in Python function that is useful when analyzing data is max(). It works in a similar way to min() which we just covered, but in reverse so to speak. Instead of finding the smallest item, it finds the largest item. Just like min(), it accepts either a sequence as input or a series of two or more items as the inputs. When given a sequence, max() returns the largest item in the sequence.…
The Python min() function is another useful function for working with numerical data in your Python programs. The min() function can accept a sequence as its input or a series of two or more items as input. If you pass a sequence to the min() function, it returns the smallest item in that sequence. If you instead pass two or more items, the min() function will return the smallest item of the items you passed in.…