Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By : Alessandro Molina
Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By: Alessandro Molina

Overview of this book

The Python 3 Standard Library is a vast array of modules that you can use for developing various kinds of applications. It contains an exhaustive list of libraries, and this book will help you choose the best one to address specific programming problems in Python. The Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook begins with recipes on containers and data structures and guides you in performing effective text management in Python. You will find Python recipes for command-line operations, networking, filesystems and directories, and concurrent execution. You will learn about Python security essentials in Python and get to grips with various development tools for debugging, benchmarking, inspection, error reporting, and tracing. The book includes recipes to help you create graphical user interfaces for your application. You will learn to work with multimedia components and perform mathematical operations on date and time. The recipes will also show you how to deploy different searching and sorting algorithms on your data. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills needed to write clean code in Python and develop applications that meet your needs.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Text similarity


In many cases, when working with text, we might have to recognize text that is similar to other text, even when the two are not equal. This is a very common case in record linkage, finding duplicate entries, or for typing errors correction.

Finding similarity across text is not a straightforward task. If you try to go your own way, you will quickly realize that it gets complex and slow pretty soon.

The Python library provides tools to detect differences between two sequences in the difflib module. Since text itself is a sequence (a sequence of characters), we can apply the provided functions to detect similarities in strings.

How to do it...

Perform the following steps for this recipe:

  1. Given a string, we want to compare:
>>> s = 'Today the weather is nice'
  1. Furthermore, we want to compare a set of strings to the first string:
>>> s2 = 'Today the weater is nice'
>>> s3 = 'Yesterday the weather was nice'
>>> s4 = 'Today my dog ate steak'
  1. We can use...