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

Saving dates


Sooner or later, we all have to save a date somewhere, sending it to a database or saving it into a file. Maybe we will be converting it into JSON to send it to another software.

Many database systems do not track time zones. Some of them have a configuration option that states what time zone they should work with, but in most cases, the date you provide will be saved as is.

This leads to unexpected bugs or behaviors in many cases. Suppose you were a good boy scout and properly did all the work required to receive a datetime preserving its time zone. Now you have a datetime of 2018-01-15 15:30:00 UTC+01:00 and, once you store it in your database, UTC+01:00 will easily be lost, even if you store it in a file yourself, storing and restoring the time zone is usually a bothersome work.

For this reason, you should always ensure you convert your datetimes to UTC before storing them somewhere, that will always guarantee that, independently from which time zone the datetime came from,...