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

Input box


When writing console-based software, it is sometimes necessary to ask users to provide long text inputs that can't easily be provided through command options.

There are few examples of this in the Unix world, such as editing crontab or tweaking multiple configuration options at once. Most of them rely on starting a fully-fledged third-party editor, such as nano or vim, but it's possible to easily roll a solution that in many cases will suffice with just the Python standard library, such that our tools can ask long or complex user input.

Getting ready

The curses library is only included in Python for Unix systems, so Windows users might need a solution, such as CygWin or the Linux Subsystem for Windows, to be able to have a Python setup that includes curses support.

How to do it...

For this recipe, perform the following steps:

  1. The Python standard library provides a curses.textpad module that has the foundation of a multiline text editor with emacs, such as key bindings. We just need to...