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10 Python one liners you’ll actually use
Tiny Python tricks that are useful, readable, and not just there to impress people on LinkedIn
5 min read4 days ago
There’s a category of Python content that’s basically just language gymnastics.
Stuff that technically works, but turns a five second task into some unreadable one-liner that nobody on your team wants to touch later.
A lot of “Python tricks” fall into that category.
Still, some one liners are genuinely useful. Not because they’re clever.
Mostly because they remove repetitive code you were going to write anyway.
These are the ones I actually see people use repeatedly.
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1. Flattening nested lists
flattened = [item for sublist in nested for item in sublist]This is one of those lines that looks weird for about ten seconds and then becomes completely normal.
You’re basically looping through each sublist, then each item inside it, and building a new flat list.
matrix = [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6]]
flattened = [item for sublist in matrix for item in sublist]…
