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

Managing filename encoding


Working with filesystems in a reliable way is not as easy as it might seem. Our system must have a specific encoding to represent text and usually that means that everything we create is handled in that encoding, including filenames.

The problem is that there is no strong guarantee on the encoding of filenames. Suppose you attach an external hard drive, what's the encoding of filenames on that drive? Well, it will depend on the encoding the system had at the time the files were created.

Usually, to cope with this problem, software tries the system encoding and if it fails, it prints some placeholders (have you ever seen a filename full of ? just because your system couldn't understand the name of the file?), which usually allows us to see that there is a file, and in many cases even open it, even though we might not know how it's actually named.

To make everything more complex, there is a big difference between Windows and Unix systems regarding how they treat filenames...