Book Image

Python Automation Cookbook

By : Jaime Buelta
Book Image

Python Automation Cookbook

By: Jaime Buelta

Overview of this book

Have you been doing the same old monotonous office work over and over again? Or have you been trying to find an easy way to make your life better by automating some of your repetitive tasks? Through a tried and tested approach, understand how to automate all the boring stuff using Python. The Python Automation Cookbook helps you develop a clear understanding of how to automate your business processes using Python, including detecting opportunities by scraping the web, analyzing information to generate automatic spreadsheets reports with graphs, and communicating with automatically generated emails. You’ll learn how to get notifications via text messages and run tasks while your mind is focused on other important activities, followed by understanding how to scan documents such as résumés. Once you’ve gotten familiar with the fundamentals, you’ll be introduced to the world of graphs, along with studying how to produce organized charts using Matplotlib. In addition to this, you’ll gain in-depth knowledge of how to generate rich graphics showing relevant information. By the end of this book, you’ll have refined your skills by attaining a sound understanding of how to identify and correct problems to produce superior and reliable systems.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Improving your debugging skills

In this recipe, we will analyze a small script that replicates a call to an external service, analyzing it and fixing some bugs. We will show different techniques to improve the debugging.

The script will ping some personal names to an internet server (httpbin.org, a test site) to get them back, simulating its retrieval from an external server. It will then split them into first and last name and prepare them to be sorted by surname. Finally, it will sort them.

The script contains several bugs that we will detect and fix.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will use the requests and parse modules and include them in our virtual environment:

$ echo "requests==2.18.3" >> requirements...