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

Aligning text


When printing tabular data, it's usually very important to ensure that the text is properly aligned to a fixed length, no longer and no shorter than the space we reserved for our table cell.

If the text is too short, the next column might start too early; if it's too long, it might start too late. This leads to results like this:

col1 | col2-1
col1-2 | col2-2

Or this:

col1-000001 | col2-1
col1-2 | col2-2

Both of these are really hard to read and are far from showing a proper table.

Given a fixed column width (20 characters), we want our text to always be of that exact length so that it won't result in a misaligned table.

How to do it...

Here are the steps for this recipe:

  1. The textwrap module once combined with the features of the str object can help us achieve the expected result. First we need the content of the columns we want to print:
cols = ['hello world', 
        'this is a long text, maybe longer than expected, surely long enough', 
        'one more column']
  1. Then we need to fix...