How to Write Clean Code in Python

towardsdatascience.com

Saved by Nicolay Gerold

RelatedHighlights

The book Clean Code introduces three laws of TDD [1]:

Write a failing unit test first before you start writing production code.

Write not more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail.

Write not more production code than is sufficient to pass the currently failing test.

So, the tests are written before the production code. This leads to the developer ... See more

How to Write Clean Code in Python

But now we are only logging that error message. It would be better to define a custom Exception that we can then handle in our API in order to return a specific error code to the user:

import pandas as pd

import logging

class DataLoadError(Exception):

"""Exception raised when the data cannot be loaded."""

def __init__(self, message="Data could not be lo... See more

How to Write Clean Code in Python

And then, in the primary function of your API:

try:
    df = load_data('path/to/data.csv')
    # Further processing and model prediction
except DataLoadError as e:
    # Return a response to the user with the error message
    # For example: return Response({"error": str(e)}, status=400)

Some important formatting rules available in this style guide:

Use four spaces for code indentation

Limit all lines to a maximum of 79 characters

Avoid extraneous whitespace in certain situations (i.e., inside brackets, between trailing comma and close parenthesis, ...)

But remember: The formatting rules should make the code more readable. Sometimes, a... See more

How to Write Clean Code in Python

Comments are helpful sometimes. But sometimes, they are just an indication of bad code.The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express ourself in code [1].Whenever you have to add a comment in your code, ask yourself if it is really required or if you could instead put that into a new function and name the function so that it... See more