Congratulations! You're using #python , the foremost support system for developing quality Python applications. We hope you'll enjoy its many unique advantages:

#python is for helping people write better programs

This means that when you ask a question, you can expect our crack team of Python experts to not merely deal with the trivial details of syntax and library usage that can easily be looked up on a search engine, but to go deeper into the design issues that can only truly be addressed in the context of your application. Expect personalized service when you're having trouble making your code behave properly. Your time won't be wasted by architecture astronauts or trivial repetitions of the docs -- just solid advice on making your code correct, readable, uncomplicated, and usable.

#python is a high signal environment

Despite being a large channel, with up to 800 participants on a busy day, discussion of Python problems is always front and center, in clear English. Our tireless moderators ensure that disruptive conversations and people are removed from the channel quickly and with a minimum of fuss. When your program is crashing and you don't know why, you don't have to worry about being drowned out by pointless chatter. Most notably, we don't tolerate use of "LOL" or other forms of 'chatspeak'.

Best Practices

For your convenience, here's a list of our advice in common situations we've seen people bring to us:

When deciding on how to layout your project

It is best to read the piece of work JP Calderone wrote on this subject.

When parsing XML or HTML, use the lxml library

lxml is probably the best library for XML and HTML parsing available. Its lxml.etree module is API-compatible with the stdlib ElementTree module, while providing many extensions such as full XPath support, XSLT support, and DTD/schema validation. Its HTML support (in lxml.html) is both fast and correct, optionally using either html5lib or BeautifulSoup for corner cases. See Ian Bicking's post about its HTML abilities.

When storing data, use SQLite or JSON

Both SQLite and JSON are available in Python's standard library and provide good support for interoperable, human-readable simple file-based data storage. As a web standard, JSON is also an excellent format for data interchange between Python programs, or Python code and programs written in other languages.

On using Python 2.x or Python 3.x

See this article on the Python wiki.

On doing networking

#python will generally refer you to Twisted for anything network-related.

On using threads

Using threads in Python does not offer what you want to accomplish in about 90% of the cases. In this 90% of cases threads are not the answer. If you are looking for a threads-like API you should look at the multiprocessing module.

Allen Short et al.