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

Writing XML/HTML content


Writing SGML-based languages is generally not very hard, most languages provide utilities to work with them, but if the document gets too big, it's easy to get lost when trying to build the tree of elements programmatically.

Ending up with hundreds of .addChild or similar calls all after each other makes it really hard to understand where we were in the document and what part of it we are currently editing.

Thankfully, by joining the Python ElementTree module with context managers, we can have a solution that allows our code structure to match the structure of the XML/HTML we are trying to generate.

How to do it...

For this recipe, perform the following steps:

  1. We can create an XMLDocument class that represents the tree of an XML/HTML document and have XMLDocumentBuilder assist in actually building the document by allowing us to insert tags and text:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
from contextlib import contextmanager


class XMLDocument:
    def __init__(self, root...