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)

Subscribing to feeds

RSS is probably the biggest secret of the internet. While its moment of glory seemed to be during the 2000s, and now it's not in the spotlight anymore, it allows easy subscription to websites. It is present in lots of places, and it's incredibly useful.

At its core, RSS is a way of presenting a succession of ordered references (typically articles, but also other elements such as podcast episodes or YouTube publications) and a publishing time. This makes for a very natural way of knowing what articles are new since the last check, as well as presenting some structured data about them, such as the title and a summary.

In this recipe, we will present the feedparser module, and determine how to obtain data from an RSS feed.

RSS is not the only available feed format. There's also a format called Atom, but both are very much equivalent. feedparser...