Book Image

Python Network Programming Techniques

By : Marcel Neidinger
Book Image

Python Network Programming Techniques

By: Marcel Neidinger

Overview of this book

Network automation offers a powerful new way of changing your infrastructure network. Gone are the days of manually logging on to different devices to type the same configuration commands over and over again. With this book, you'll find out how you can automate your network infrastructure using Python. You'll get started on your network automation journey with a hands-on introduction to the network programming basics to complement your infrastructure knowledge. You'll learn how to tackle different aspects of network automation using Python programming and a variety of open source libraries. In the book, you'll learn everything from templating, testing, and deploying your configuration on a device-by-device basis to using high-level REST APIs to manage your cloud-based infrastructure. Finally, you'll see how to automate network security with Cisco’s Firepower APIs. By the end of this Python network programming book, you'll have not only gained a holistic overview of the different methods to automate the configuration and maintenance of network devices, but also learned how to automate simple to complex networking tasks and overcome common network programming challenges.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Converting between data types in Python

While Python does determine the data type of a variable automatically, we often like to explicitly convert a variable from one data type to another. An example of where this is useful could be a user providing an input—for example, their age—from the terminal. The variable would have the str data type, but we might need it as an integer. This is where converting between data types—or type casting—comes into play.

In this recipe, you will see how to receive an input from a user and convert the received string into an integer.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and start by creating a file called convert_variables.py. Next, navigate your terminal to the same directory in which you just created the convert_variables.py file.

How to do it…

In this recipe, we will receive the user's age as input in the form of a string. We will then convert that string into a number, add 10 to it, and convert...