ONLIX Blog » @programming (Last update: Wed 21/12/2022)

Useful Python Code Snippets

Pip notice

Troubleshooting

If you get an ModuleNotFoundError, open your terminal and type pip (and obviously press enter). If you get an error, please install pip first. Next, try that command again. If everything works, type pip install and then the module which lead to an error. You can check the code or the error traceback. For example: pip install requests. You can also try pip3 if that seems to work better for you. To check what packages you have installed, type pip freeze. Get a warning saying you're using an old version of pip, type pip install --upgrade pip. Upgrading/updating is very important because in the worst case, they could even fix security vulnerabilities!

No package found?

Do you get the following message?

ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement asd8asd (from versions: none)
ERROR: No matching distribution found for asd8asd

This means you misspelled the library name. Go to https://pypi.org and search for the package you want to import!

Tip: If you're using DuckDuckGo, try !pip <package-name>, e.g. !pip requests. This will automatically redirect you to the results ;)

Packages you need to install

Some of the following code snippets require some packages. Simply type pip install package-name-here in your terminal for every single one of these. An example (with output):

pip install sklearn

Collecting sklearn
...
Downloading scikit_learn-1.1....whl (30.4 MB)
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 30.4/30.4 MB 14.0 MB/s eta 0:00:00
...
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 307.0/307.0 kB 34.4 MB/s eta 0:00:00
...
Installing collected packages: threadpoolctl, scipy, joblib, scikit-learn, sklearn
Running setup.py install for sklearn ... done
Successfully installed ...

The dots (...) are by me to shorten the example.

If you want to install more than one package at once, separate them using a space. For example:

pip install pandas sklearn requests

Which will install all of them. Then

If you are unsure wether you've already downloaded a package or not, don't worry - pip will simply skip the installation or update the package. So just install all of the packages to be sure!

File objects

String to BytesIO/pseudo file (Virtual File Processing)

Have you ever wondered how you can create a download button on your Flask website without having to actually save anything on your hard drive? This can be really useful for output files, logs or similar.

It's actually pretty simple!

import io 
io.BytesIO('Hello World!'.encode('utf-8')

The code snippet above isn't that useful without any context, but can help you to understand how you can convert strings to io.BytesIO objects.

Here's an example of how you can implement this functionality for your Flask server:

...

@app.route('/example.log')
def log_download():
    text = 'Hello, world!'

    return flask.send_file(io.BytesIO(text.encode('utf-8')), mimetype='text/html', attachment_filename='example.log' ,as_attachment=True)

...

This will create a website route (/example.log) with a file download. You can change the variable text to represent any string you want to. How about the current time?

Get Date & Time (datetime)

The following code will return the current time and date nicely formatted. You might also want to check out the Python strftime cheatsheet.

Code

from datetime import datetime

# TIP · Don't use "time" as a variable name
# because it could lead to conflicts with the "time" library!

current_time = datetime.now().strftime("%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S")
print(current_time)

Example Output

21/12/2022 19:50:59

Unix Timestamp int to datetime

The following code won't format the code - for that, see the section above.

import datetime

unix_time = 1664094041
date_time = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(unix_time) # a datetime object

It's as simple as that!

Get Linux Distribution Name & Info

This only works on Linux systems! Python will grab the content of /etc/os-release and return a dictionary we can work with:

Code

import platform

distro = platform.freedesktop_os_release()

print(distro.get('NAME')) # Distro Name
print(distro.get('ID_LIKE') or 'Linux Kernel') # Distro is based on...
print(distro.get('BUILD_ID') or distro.get('VERSION_ID') # Distro Version

Example output

EndeavourOS
arch
2022.04.08

or:

Debian GNU/Linux
Linux Kernel
10

Troubleshooting

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "[...]", line 3, in <module>
    distro = platform.freedesktop_os_release()
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'freedesktop_os_release'

This could mean you're using an older version of Python (3.10+ is supported!). But don't worry! There are also backports available.

Networking

Get the device's IP Address, location, ISP info, domain & more

According to the API's website, up to 50K requests/month are allowed. That should be more than enough. It can take a few seconds to get the IP info, though.

Dependencies

Before we can run the code, we might also need to quickly install the needed packages. Don't know how to use pip or think you don't have it installed? Getting an error? See the top of this page!

• requests

Code

import requests
import webbrowser

response = requests.get('https://ipinfo.io/json').json() # send website request
print(response['ip'])
print(f'{response["city"]} in {response["region"]}, {response["country"]}')
print(response.get('org') or 'No organization.')

if response.get('hostname'): # website detected on server
    if input(f'Website detected: {response.get("hostname")}. Type y and press enter to open.') == 'y':
        webbrowser.open('hostname')

Example output

My server:

173.212.213.133
Oberdorla in Thuringia, DE
AS51167 Contabo GmbH
Website detected: vmd80690.contaboserver.net. Type y and press enter to open.

or: (I changed it up a bit)

74.145.169.142
Berlin in Berlin, DE
AS5555 Vodafone Deutschland GmbH

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