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

Working with paths


Python was originally created as a system management language. It was originally meant to write scripts for the Unix system, so navigating the disk has always been one of the core parts of the language, but in the most recent versions of Python, this was extended further with the pathlib module, which makes it very convenient and easy to build paths that refer to files or directories, without having to care about the system we are running on.

Since writing multiplatform software can be bothersome, it's very important to have intermediate layers that abstract the conventions of the underlying system and allow us to write code that will work everywhere.

Especially when working with paths, the differences between how Unix and Windows systems treating paths can be problematic. The fact that one system uses / and the other \ to separate the parts of the path is bothersome by itself, but Windows also has the concept of drivers while Unix systems don't, so we need something that...