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

Searching, sorting, filtering


Searching for an element is a very common need in programming. Looking up an item in a container is basically the most frequent operation that your code will probably do, so it's very important that it's quick and reliable.

Sorting is frequently connected to searching, as it's often possible to involve smarter lookup solutions when you know your set is sorted, and sorting means continuously searching and moving items until they are in sorted order. So they frequently go together.

Python has built-in functions to sort containers of any type and look up items in them, even with functions that are able to leverage the sorted sequence.

How to do it...

For this recipe, the following steps are to be performed:

  1. Take the following set of elements:
>>> values = [ 5, 3, 1, 7 ]
  1. Looking up an element in the sequence can be done through the in operator:
>>> 5 in values
True
  1. Sorting can be done through the sorted function:
>>> sorted_value = sorted(values...