Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By : Alessandro Molina
Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By: Alessandro Molina

Overview of this book

The Python 3 Standard Library is a vast array of modules that you can use for developing various kinds of applications. It contains an exhaustive list of libraries, and this book will help you choose the best one to address specific programming problems in Python. The Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook begins with recipes on containers and data structures and guides you in performing effective text management in Python. You will find Python recipes for command-line operations, networking, filesystems and directories, and concurrent execution. You will learn about Python security essentials in Python and get to grips with various development tools for debugging, benchmarking, inspection, error reporting, and tracing. The book includes recipes to help you create graphical user interfaces for your application. You will learn to work with multimedia components and perform mathematical operations on date and time. The recipes will also show you how to deploy different searching and sorting algorithms on your data. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills needed to write clean code in Python and develop applications that meet your needs.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Handling cookies


Cookies are frequently used in web applications to store data in browsers. The most frequent use case is user identification.

We are going to implement a very simple and insecure identification system based on cookies to show how to use them.

How to do it...

The http.cookies.SimpleCookie class provides all the facilities required to parse and generate cookies.

  1. We can rely on it to create a web application endpoint that will set a cookie:
from web_06 import WSGIApplication

app = WSGIApplication()

import time
from http.cookies import SimpleCookie

@app.route('/identity')
def identity(req, resp):
    identity = int(time.time())

    cookie = SimpleCookie()
    cookie['identity'] = 'USER: {}'.format(identity)

    for set_cookie in cookie.values():
        resp.headers.add_header('Set-Cookie', set_cookie.OutputString())
    return b'Go back to <a href="/">index</a> to check your identity'
  1. We can use it to create one that will parse the cookie and tell us who the current...