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up vote 2 down vote favorite

I'm newbie in Python but I want to know some tricks to make my code look cute. I know that syntax of Python allows to do this, but I don't know how. Suppose I have file with lines of format "x y z" and I want to parse it and make some objects. Now code looks like this:

class Point(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y, z):
        self.x = x;
        self.y = y;
        self.z = z;

...

def load_file(file_path):
    points = [];
    with open(file_path, "r") as input_file:
        for line in input_file:
            str_point = line.split();
            x = float(str_point[0]);
            y = float(str_point[1]);
            z = float(str_point[2]);
            points.append(Point(x, y, z));
    return points;

Is there any way to make this code simpler?

share|improve this question
up vote 2 down vote

Instead of parsing x, y, z one by one, you can use a list comprehension, and pass the whole thing directly to the the constructor of Point using * like this:

def load_file(file_path):
    objects = []
    with open(file_path) as input_file:
        for line in input_file:
            obj = Point(*[float(x) for x in line.split()])
            objects.append(obj)
    return objects

I dropped the "r" in open(..., "r"), as that's the default anyway. Even more importantly, ; are not required to end statements in Python, and they are just noise in the posted code.

It would be even cuter to use a generator pattern instead:

def load_file(file_path):
    with open(file_path) as input_file:
        for line in input_file:
            yield Point(*[float(x) for x in line.split()])

You could iterate over this to do something with the objects, for example:

for obj in load_file(file_path):
    # do something ...

Or you could load all into a list using a list comprehension:

objects = [x for x in load_file(file_path)]
share|improve this answer

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