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)

Parsing HTML

Downloading raw text or a binary file is a good starting point, but the main language of the web is HTML.

HTML is a structured language, defining different parts of a document such as headers and paragraphs. HTML is also hierarchical, defining sub-elements. The ability to parse raw text into a structured document is basically to be able to extract information automatically from a web page. For example, some text can be relevant if enclosed in a particular class div or after a header h3 tag.

Getting ready

We'll use the excellent Beautiful Soup module to parse the HTML text into a memory object that can be analyzed. We need to use the beautifulsoup4 package to use the latest Python 3 version that is available...