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

Templating


A very frequent need when showing text to users is to generate it dynamically depending on the state of the software.

Typically, this leads to code like this:

name = 'Alessandro'
messages = ['Message 1', 'Message 2']

txt = 'Hello %s, You have %s message' % (name, len(messages))
if len(messages) > 1:
    txt += 's'
txt += ':n'
for msg in messages:
    txt += msg + 'n'
print(txt)

This makes it very hard to foresee the upcoming structure of the message and it's also very hard to maintain in the long term. To generate text, it's usually more convenient to reverse the approach and instead of putting text in code, we shall put code in text. That's exactly what template engines do and, while the standard library has very complete solutions for formatting, it lacks a template engine out of the box, but it can easily be extended to make one.

How to do it...

The steps for this recipe are:

  1. The string.Formatter object allows you to extend its syntax, so we can specialize it to support injecting...