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)

Crawling the web

Given the nature of hyperlink pages, starting from a known place and following links to other pages is a very important tool in the arsenal when scraping the web.

To do so, we crawl a page looking for a small phrase, and will print any paragraph that contains it. We will search only in pages that belong to the same site. I.e. only URLs starting with www.somesite.com. We won't follow links to external sites.

Getting ready

This recipe builds on the introduced concepts, so it will download and parse the pages to search for links and continue downloading.

When crawling the web, remember to set limits when downloading. It's very easy to crawl over too many pages. As anyone checking Wikipedia can confirm...