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Handling Long Lines Of Code
Often engineers and data scientists run into a situation where they have a very long line of code. This is both ugly and break’s Pythonic best practices.
Preliminaries
import statistics
Create Data
ages_of_community_members = [39, 23, 55, 23, 53, 27, 34, 67, 32, 34, 56]
number_of_ages = [4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 5, 7, 3, 2, 4]
Create Long Line Of Code
member_years_by_age = [first_list_element * second_list_element for first_list_element, second_list_element in zip(ages_of_community_members, number_of_ages)]
Shorten Long Line
While you can use \
to break up lines of code. A more simple and readable option is to take advantage of the fact that line breaks are ignored inside []
, {}
, and []
. Then use comments to help the reader understand the line.
# Create a variable with the count of members per age
member_years_by_age = [# multiple the first list's element by the second list's element
first_list_element * second_list_element
# for the first list's elements and second list's element
for first_list_element, second_list_element
# for each element in a zip between the age of community members
in zip(ages_of_community_members,
# and the number of members by age
number_of_ages)
]