11 Essential Pythonic Tricks to Write Cleaner, Faster Code

If you can use Python in a Pythonic way, Python is an elegant language.

Regardless of experience, writing real Python code takes time. This article shares 11 Pythonic tricks to boost your Python skills.

1. Destructuring Assignment in Python

Assigning variables is a basic operation; Python provides syntactic sugar to make it more elegant.

a, *mid, b = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
print(a, mid, b)  # 1 [2, 3, 4, 5] 6

With the star, mid captures the middle items as a list.

2. Using the zip Function to Aggregate Items

The built‑in zip function aggregates elements from multiple iterables (lists, tuples, sets) and returns an iterator.

ids = [1, 2, 3, 4]
leaders = ['Elon Musk', 'Tim Cook', 'Bill Gates', 'Yang Zhou']
sex = ['male', 'male', 'male', 'male']
record = zip(ids, leaders, sex)
print(list(record))
# [(1, 'Elon Musk', 'male'), (2, 'Tim Cook', 'male'), (3, 'Bill Gates', 'male'), (4, 'Yang Zhou', 'male')]

3. Proper Use of Lambda Functions

Lambda functions are handy for one‑liners. Example: print all odd numbers from a list.

numbers = [1, 37, 43, 51, 83, 43]
print(list(filter(lambda x: x % 2 == 1, numbers)))
# [1, 37, 43, 51, 83, 43]

4. Ignoring Variables with an Underscore

When a variable is unused, you can ignore it with an underscore.

L = [1, 3, 5, 7]
a, _, b, _ = L
print(a, b)  # 1 5

5. Harnessing List Comprehensions

List comprehensions condense multiple operations into a single line.

Genius = ["Jerry", "Jack", "tom", "yang"]
L1 = [name if name.startswith('y') else 'Not Genius' for name in Genius]
print(L1)
# ['Not Genius', 'Not Genius', 'Not Genius', 'yang']

6. Placing a Placeholder

When a function’s implementation is pending, use pass or an ellipsis as a placeholder.

def my_func():
    pass
# or

def my_func():
    ...

7. Processing Text with Regular Expressions

The re module provides full regex support.

import re
txt = "Yang is so handsome!!!"
result = re.search("Elon", txt)
print(result)  # None

8. map and reduce in Python

map

applies a function to each element of an iterable, returning a new iterator.

names = ['yAnG', 'MASk', 'thoMas', 'LISA']
names = map(str.capitalize, names)
print(list(names))
# ['Yang', 'Mask', 'Thomas', 'Lisa']

reduce

cumulatively applies a two‑argument function to the items of an iterable.

from functools import reduce
city = ['L', 'o', 'n', 'd', 'o', 'n', 2, 0, 2, 0]
city_str = reduce(lambda x, y: str(x) + str(y), city)
print(city_str)  # London2020

9. Elegantly Removing Unnecessary Spaces

Combine split() and join() to normalize whitespace.

quote = "   Yang   is a full   stack hacker."
new_quote = ' '.join(quote.split())
print(new_quote)
# Yang is a full stack hacker.

10. The Simplest Way to Shallow‑Copy a List

a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
b = a[:]
b[0] = 100
print(b)  # [100, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
print(a)  # [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

11. Checking the Last Expression Value in the Interpreter

Use an underscore to retrieve the result of the most recent expression.

>> 5 + 6
11
>>> _
11

These 11 Pythonic tricks aim to make your code cleaner, more concise, and more Python‑idiomatic.