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)
                          ]