Building a minimal plugin architecture in Python

>>> import os
>>> os.path.abspath("mydir/myfile.txt")
"C:/example/cwd/mydir/myfile.txt"

Also works if it is already an absolute path:

>>> import os
>>> os.path.abspath("C:/example/cwd/mydir/myfile.txt")
"C:/example/cwd/mydir/myfile.txt"

os.path.isabs returns True if the path is absolute, False if not. The documentation says it works in windows (I can confirm it works in Linux personally).

os.path.isabs(my_path)

You should use urlparse.urljoin :

>>> import urlparse
>>> urlparse.urljoin(url1, url2)
"http://127.0.0.1/test1/test4/test6.xml"

With Python 3 (where urlparse is renamed to urllib.parse) you could use it as follow:

>>> import urllib.parse
>>> urllib.parse.urljoin(url1, url2)
"http://127.0.0.1/test1/test4/test6.xml"

You can also write:

[e] * n

You should note that if e is for example an empty list you get a list with n references to the same list, not n independent empty lists.

Performance testing

At first glance it seems that repeat is the fastest way to create a list with n identical elements:

>>> timeit.timeit("itertools.repeat(0, 10)", "import itertools", number = 1000000)
0.37095273281943264
>>> timeit.timeit("[0] * 10", "import itertools", number = 1000000)
0.5577236771712819

But wait - it"s not a fair test...

>>> itertools.repeat(0, 10)
repeat(0, 10)  # Not a list!!!

The function itertools.repeat doesn"t actually create the list, it just creates an object that can be used to create a list if you wish! Let"s try that again, but converting to a list:

>>> timeit.timeit("list(itertools.repeat(0, 10))", "import itertools", number = 1000000)
1.7508119747063233

So if you want a list, use [e] * n. If you want to generate the elements lazily, use repeat.

If your program doesn"t have a event loop already, use the sched module, which implements a general purpose event scheduler.

import sched, time
s = sched.scheduler(time.time, time.sleep)
def do_something(sc): 
    print("Doing stuff...")
    # do your stuff
    s.enter(60, 1, do_something, (sc,))

s.enter(60, 1, do_something, (s,))
s.run()

If you"re already using an event loop library like asyncio, trio, tkinter, PyQt5, gobject, kivy, and many others - just schedule the task using your existing event loop library"s methods, instead.

Lock your time loop to the system clock like this:

import time
starttime = time.time()
while True:
    print "tick"
    time.sleep(60.0 - ((time.time() - starttime) % 60.0))

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