How to use Functions In Python

• Sibling of Floor function: Suppose we want to find the floor value of a real number, we generally import floor function from math and then apply on the number. But we can simply apply the floor division with 1, which will give us a fruitful result. 

  Original Code: 

from math import floor
n = 3/2
print(floor(n))

Golfed Code: 

n = 3/2
print(n//1)

• Sibling of Ceil function: Suppose we want to find the ceil value of a real number, we generally import ceil function from math and then apply on the number. But we can do this operation in a more beautiful manner by first multiplying with -1 and then apply floor division with 1 and again multiply with -1. 

  Original Code: 

from math import ceil
n = 3/2
print(ceil(n))

Golfed Code: 

n = 3/2
print(-(-n//1))

• Lambda functions: Lambda definition does not include a “return” statement, it always contains an expression which is returned. We can also put a lambda definition anywhere a function is expected, and we don’t have to assign it to a variable at all. This is the simplicity of lambda functions. 

  Original Code: 

def c(a):
  if a < 3: return a-5
  else: return a+5

Golfed Code: 

c=lambda a:a<3and a-5or a+5

• To get the entire alphabet string: We can use the map function of python to get the string of whole alphabet set. 

  Original code: 

string = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
or 
string = [chr(i+97)for i in range(26)]

Golfed Code: 

string = map(chr,range(97,123))

Code Golf in Python refers to attempting to solve a problem using the least amount of characters possible. Like in Golf, the low score wins, the fewest amount of characters “wins”. 

Python is a fantastic language for code golfing due to backward compatibility, quirks, it being a high-level language, and all the coercion. So, here we will look at some Code golfing techniques in Python language.