Few weeks ago I needed a crawler for data collection and sorting so I started learning python. Same day I wrote a simple crawler but the code looked ugly as hell. Mainly because I don't know how to do certain things and I don't know how to properly google them. Example: Instead of deleting [, ] and ' in one line I did
extra_nr = extra_nr.replace("'", '')
extra_nr = extra_nr.replace("[", '')
extra_nr = extra_nr.replace("]", '')
extra_nr = extra_nr.replace(",", '')
Because I couldn't do stuff to list object and when I did str(list object) It looked like ['this', 'and this']. Now I'm creating discord bot that will upload data that I feed to it to google spreadsheet. The code is long and ugly. And it takes like 2-3 secs to start the bot (idk if this is normal, I think the more I write the more time it takes to start it which makes me think that code is garbage). Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
My question is how do I know that I wrote something good? And if I just keep adding stuff like in the example, how will it affect my program? If I have a really long code do I split it and call the parts of it only when they are needed or how does it work?
tl;dr to get good at Python and write good code, write a lot of Python and read other people's code. Learn multiple approaches to different problem types and get a feel for which to use and when. It's something that comes over time with a lot of practice. As far as resources, I highly recommend the book "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python".
As for your code sample, you could use translate for this:
def strip(my_string):
bad_chars = [*"[],'"]
return my_string.translate({ord(c): None for c in bad_chars})
translate does a character by character translation of the string given a translation table, so you create a small translation table with the characters you don't want set to None.
The list of characters you don't want is created by unpacking (splatting) a string of the characters.
>>> [*"abc"] == ["a", "b", "c"]
True
Another option would be using comprehensions:
def strip(my_string):
bad_chars = [*"[],'"]
return "".join(c for c in my_string if c not in bad_chars)
Here we use the comprehension format [x for x in y] to build a new list of xs from y, just specifying to drop the character if it appears in bad_chars. We then join the remaining list of characters into a string that doesn't have the specified characters in it.