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

Testing


To ensure that your code is correct and doesn't break on future changes, writing tests is usually one of the best things you can do.

In Python, there are a few frameworks to implement test suites that can automatically verify code reliability, implement different patterns such as behavior-driver development (BDD), or even automatically find corner cases for you.

But simple automatic tests can be written just by relying on the standard library itself, so that you will need third-party testing frameworks only if you need specific plugins or patterns.

The standard library has the unittest module, which allows us to write tests for our software, run them, and report the state of the test suite.

How to do it...

For this recipe, the following steps are to be performed:

  1. Say we have a divide function we want to write tests for:
def divide(x, y):
    return x / y
  1. We need to create a file named test_divide.py (it's important that files containing tests are named test_*.py or the tests won't run)....