Python, for all its power and popularity, has long lacked a form of flow control found in other languages—a way to take a value and match it elegantly against one of a number of possible conditions.

In the following example, we loop through a list of numbers, and use the variable digit to hold each number in turn: Strings in Python are considered “sequences” — they can be iterated over, and the ...

If you work with strings in your Python scripts and you're writing obscure logic to process them, then you need to look into regex in Python. It lets you describe patterns instead of writing ...