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

Pattern matching


When looking for patterns in text, regular expressions are frequently the most common way to attach those kind of problems. They are very flexible and powerful, and even though they cannot express all kinds of grammar they frequently can handle most common cases.

The power of regular expressions comes out of the wide set of symbols and expressions they can generate. The problem is that for developers that are not used to regular expressions, they can look just like plain noise, and even people who have experience with them will frequently have to think a bit before understanding an expression like the following one:

"^(*d{3})*( |-)*d{3}( |-)*d{4}$"

This expression actually tries to detect phone numbers.

For most common cases, developers need to look for very simple patterns: for example, file extensions (does it end with .txt?), separated text, and so on.

How to do it...

The fnmatch module provides a simplified pattern-matching language with a very quick and easy-to-understand...