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)

Dealing with encodings

Text files can be present in different encodings. In recent years, the situation has greatly improved, but there are still compatibility problems when working with different systems.

There's a difference between raw data in a file and a string object in Python. The string object has been transformed from whatever encoding the file contains into a native string. Once it is in this format, it may need to be stored in different encodings. By default, Python works with the defined by the OS, which in modern operating systems is UTF-8. This is a highly compatible encoding, but you may need to save files in a different one.

Getting ready

We prepared two files in the GitHub repository that store the string...