Monthly Archives: February 2008

When the “Python Vs PHP” war matters

Posted by on February 21st, 2008 9 comments

Yesterday I had a meet­ing with a cus­tomer about a new site I should develop for them. Since they’re a book pub­lisher, they wanted an online book store. Apart from the tech­ni­cal details (the site isn’t as simple as you may believe, they need a lot of not-so-easy-to-do stuff), the most impor­tant point we focused on is the fact that they have an inter­nal IT tech­ni­cian that han­dles all their com­puter needs. If you’re asking your­self why this mat­ters, keep reading:

  • me (to be precise, my company) stopped development of PHP sites about one year ago in favor of Python
  • we release the web site’s code to them
  • for this project, we haven’t been asked any kind of future support; this means that when the site is finished, we won’t touch the product anymore (unless they don’t pay us to do the modifies they need)
  • but they don’t want to pay us to these modifies, because they have their internal IT technician
  • their technician knows only PHP (and he never even known the Python’s existence until yesterday)

Read more »

Python listdir order

Posted by on February 15th, 2008 8 comments

Just a quick tip. If you’re using the python’s os.listdir() func­tion you may be not happy at all with the way it orders results. The fol­low­ing code snip­pet orders the result of the list­dir so it shows direc­to­ries first and then files, and sorts these two groups alphabetically:

import os
def custom_listdir(path):
    """
    Returns the content of a directory by showing directories first
    and then files by ordering the names alphabetically
    """
    dirs = sorted([d for d in os.listdir(path) if os.path.isdir(path + os.path.sep + d)])
    dirs.extend(sorted([f for f in os.listdir(path) if os.path.isfile(path + os.path.sep + f)]))

    return dirs