Question

I’ve created a small python script to toggle between two files I’m using for testing.

My question is, what is a good Python format style for the following code:

import filecmp import shutil  local = 'local.txt' remote = 'remote.txt' config_file = 'C:\some\path\file.txt'  shutil.copyfile( remote if( filecmp.cmp(local, config_file ) ) else local, config_file  ) 

Or

shutil.copyfile( remote                       if( filecmp.cmp(local, config_file ) )                       else local,                  config_file  ) 

Or

tocopy = remote if( filecmp.cmp( local, config_file ) ) else local  shutil.copyfile( tocopy, config_file ) 

Or what?

Also, what is the preferred way to name var in python for many-word names, is it ‘to_copy’, ‘tocopy’, ‘toCopy’, ‘ToCopy’

Answer 1

For the conditional statement, I would probably go with:

if filecmp.cmp(local, config_file):     shutil.copyfile(remote, config_file) else:     shutil.copyfile(local, config_file) 

There’s little need to use the inline y if x else z in this case, since the surrounding code is simple enough.