One of the delights of coming back to Python in an intensive way after many years is some of the new ways to do the usual things that I hadn’t learned before.

In this case, I am finding the use of “f-strings” (introduced in Python 3.6, described in PEP 498) to be quite delightful.

print(f"Warning: {sys.argv[2]} exists!")

The previous syntax for format strings always slipped away from my memory, but these seem a lot stickier, and they give me a lot of freedom to just keep writing.

Python is not the greatest language in the universe, but it can allow a lot of fluency that I never experienced in other languages.

The problem of keeping secrets – usernames, passwords, API keys, etc, in code that you write is a pretty old problem. I haven’t had a solution that I liked – especially when I am putting code up on github, for a long time.

Until now. I am putting things like that in a “secrets” file, or in environment variables, which are easy to access from your code, but don’t show up in your code repository. Here’s an example in Python of keeping a “secrets” file that the script can access, and then yoinking its contents into a dictionary for easy reference:

def getSecrets():

def getSecrets():
  SECRETFILE = os.environ["SECRETFILE"]
  with open(SECRETFILE , "r") as scrts:
    return dict(line.strip().split("=====") for line in scrts)

secrets = getSecrets()

api_url = secrets["Test API URL"]
api_key = secrets["Test API Key"]

""" The file itself would look like this:

API Key=====zEV}pF_vn4g35Ye:
API URL=====https://example.com
..."""