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<rss version="2.0"><channel><title>Loop &amp; Branch</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/</link><description>Practical notes for Python and web developers</description><item><title>Convert PDF to DOCX and DOCX to PDF Using Python</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/convert-pdf-to-docx-and-docx-to-pdf-using-python/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/convert-pdf-to-docx-and-docx-to-pdf-using-python/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Convert PDF to Word with pdf2docx and Word to PDF with docx2pdf or headless LibreOffice from Python, including batch jobs, Linux servers and output checks.</description></item><item><title>Event Calendar in Laravel with FullCalendar v6: A Complete Example</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/event-calendar-example-in-laravel/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/event-calendar-example-in-laravel/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Build an event calendar in Laravel 10/11 with FullCalendar v6: migration, JSON feed for the visible range, create by selection, drag-and-drop and delete.</description></item><item><title>How to Check the Python Version in a Jupyter Notebook</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/how-to-check-python-version-in-jupyter-notebook/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/how-to-check-python-version-in-jupyter-notebook/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Check the Python version a Jupyter kernel really runs with sys.version and sys.executable, avoid the !python --version trap and register a venv as a kernel.</description></item><item><title>How to Create a Two-Dimensional Array in Python</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/how-to-create-a-two-dimensional-array-in-python/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/how-to-create-a-two-dimensional-array-in-python/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Create 2D arrays in Python with nested list comprehensions or NumPy, avoid the [[0]*n]*m aliasing bug, and index, iterate, transpose and slice correctly.</description></item><item><title>Fix UnicodeDecodeError When Reading a CSV File in pandas</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/how-to-fix-unicodedecodeerror-when-reading-csv-file-in-pandas-with-python/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/how-to-fix-unicodedecodeerror-when-reading-csv-file-in-pandas-with-python/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Why pd.read_csv raises UnicodeDecodeError: &#x27;utf-8&#x27; codec can&#x27;t decode byte, and how to fix it with the right encoding, BOM handling and UTF-8 conversion.</description></item><item><title>How to Generate Random Integers in Python</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/how-to-generate-random-integers-in-python/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/how-to-generate-random-integers-in-python/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Generate random integers in Python with random.randint, randrange, sample, secrets.randbelow and NumPy&#x27;s rng.integers, plus seeding, uniqueness and speed.</description></item><item><title>How to Install dlib for PyCharm on Windows, macOS and Linux</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/how-to-install-dlib-on-pycharm/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/how-to-install-dlib-on-pycharm/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Install dlib for a PyCharm project: why pip compiles it, setting up CMake and a C++ compiler, the easier conda-forge route, and fixing Failed building wheel.</description></item><item><title>How to Install Tkinter for PyCharm (Windows, macOS, Linux)</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/how-to-install-tkinter-on-pycharm/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/how-to-install-tkinter-on-pycharm/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Tkinter ships with Python and cannot be installed with pip. Check for it, add it on Windows, macOS or Linux, and point PyCharm at an interpreter that has it.</description></item><item><title>Installing Python Packages in PyCharm: The Complete Guide</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/installing-python-packages-in-pycharm/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/installing-python-packages-in-pycharm/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Install Python packages in PyCharm via the Packages tool window, interpreter settings or pip; venv vs conda, requirements.txt and fixing import errors.</description></item><item><title>Kurtosis in Python: SciPy, pandas and NumPy Explained</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/kurtosis-in-python/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/kurtosis-in-python/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Compute kurtosis in Python with scipy.stats.kurtosis, pandas Series.kurt and NumPy. Excess vs Pearson, the bias flag, worked examples and how to interpret it.</description></item><item><title>PySimpleGUI: Using an Image as a Button</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/pysimplegui-image-button/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/pysimplegui-image-button/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Make image buttons in PySimpleGUI or FreeSimpleGUI with image_filename or base64 image_data, a borderless look, scaling, toggled images and event handling.</description></item><item><title>How to Check the Version of a Python Package With pip</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-check-version-of-package-with-pip/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-check-version-of-package-with-pip/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Check an installed Python package version with pip show, pip list and pip freeze, or in code with importlib.metadata, and compare versions safely.</description></item><item><title>Count Word Occurrences in a Python List</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-count-word-occurrences-in-list/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-count-word-occurrences-in-list/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Count how often words appear in a Python list with list.count, collections.Counter, dict and defaultdict loops, normalization of case and punctuation, and pandas.</description></item><item><title>Factorial in Python: Iterative, Recursive and math.factorial</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-factorial-iterative-recursive/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-factorial-iterative-recursive/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Compute factorials in Python with a loop, recursion, math.factorial, reduce and memoization, with input validation, big integers and real timeit benchmarks.</description></item><item><title>How to Get Values From a Nested Dictionary in Python</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-get-values-from-a-nested-dictionary/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-get-values-from-a-nested-dictionary/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Get values from nested dictionaries in Python: chained indexing, safe .get() chains, a deep_get helper, lists in dicts, recursion, json_normalize and glom.</description></item><item><title>Python: Split a String into a List (split, re.split, csv, shlex)</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-split-string-into-list/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-split-string-into-list/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Split strings into lists in Python: str.split with and without sep, maxsplit, rsplit, splitlines, re.split for multiple delimiters, list(), csv and shlex.</description></item><item><title>TypeError: &#x27;NoneType&#x27; object is not subscriptable in Python</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-typeerror-nonetype-object-is-not-subscriptable/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-typeerror-nonetype-object-is-not-subscriptable/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Fix &#x27;NoneType&#x27; object is not subscriptable: common causes (list.sort(), dict.get, re.match, JSON null), reading the traceback, and catching it with mypy.</description></item><item><title>Sending HTTP Requests in Python with urllib3</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-urllib3-http-requests/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-urllib3-http-requests/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>How to send GET and POST requests with urllib3: PoolManager, query fields, JSON bodies, headers, timeouts, Retry, redirects, TLS, streaming and errors (v2).</description></item><item><title>ValueError: could not convert string to float in Python (Fixes)</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-valueerror-could-not-convert-string-to-float/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/python-valueerror-could-not-convert-string-to-float/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Why float() raises &quot;could not convert string to float&quot;: empty strings, commas, currency symbols, N/A values, and how to fix them in Python and pandas.</description></item><item><title>Scrapy vs Selenium: Choosing a Python Web Scraping Tool</title><link>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/scrapy-vs-selenium/</link><guid>https://softbranchdevelopers.com/scrapy-vs-selenium/</guid><pubDate>2026-10-24</pubDate><description>Scrapy vs Selenium compared: architecture, JavaScript rendering, speed, scaling and pipelines, with working code for each and when to use scrapy-playwright.</description></item></channel></rss>
