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

Expanding filenames


In the everyday use of our system, we are used to providing paths, such as *.py, to identify all the Python files, so it's not a surprise that our users expect to be able to do the same when they provide one or more files to our software.

Usually, wildcards are expanded by the shell itself, but suppose you are reading them from a configuration file or you want to write a tool that clears the .pyc files (a cache of compiled Python bytecode) in your current project, then the Python standard library has what you need.

How to do it...

The steps for this recipe are:

  1. pathlib is able to perform many operations on the path you provided. One of them is resolving wildcards:
>>> list(pathlib.Path('.').glob('*.py'))
[PosixPath('conf.py')]
  1. It also supports resolving wildcards recursively:
>>> list(pathlib.Path('.').glob('**/*.py'))
[PosixPath('conf.py'), PosixPath('venv/bin/cmark.py'), 
 PosixPath('venv/bin/rst2html.py'), ...]