[BangPypers] Favorite tips/techniques

[CsquaredinOmaha]

For a while I had thought it would be interesting to hear "tips/techniques you 
find yourself often using"  - or perhaps found useful at one point (and thus would be valuable to newbies).

It could be simple snippet, or some description of  logic, technique or steps.
From simple to sophisticated is less the issue - more that you  "found it handy and used it alot".

Whatever use area:  ETL data files, servers, SQL maintenance, webcrawlers, anything. 



#--here is a snippet to open Windows File Explorer to select a file 
#--file explorer to select,open, and then parse network IP logfile
from Tkinter import *
import tkFileDialog
logfilename = tkFileDialog.askopenfilename()

#print logfilename
logfile = open(logfilename, "r")