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

Reading/writing a database


Python is often referred to as a language that has batteries included, thanks to its very complete standard library, and one of the best features it provides is reading and writing from a full-featured relational database.

Python ships with the SQLite library built in, meaning that we can save and read database files stored by SQLite.

The usage is pretty straightforward and most of it actually just involves sending SQL for execution.

How to do it...

For this recipes, the steps are as follows:

  1. Using the sqlite3 module, it's possible to create a new database file, create a table, and insert entries into it:
import sqlite3


with sqlite3.connect('/tmp/test.db') as db:
    try:
        db.execute('''CREATE TABLE people (
            id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT NOT NULL, 
            name TEXT, 
            surname TEXT, 
            language TEXT
        )''')
    except sqlite3.OperationalError:
        # Table already exists
        pass

    sql = 'INSERT INTO...