Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By : Molina
Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By: 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 (16 chapters)

Displaying dates in user format


When displaying dates from software, it's easy to confuse users if they don't know the format you are going to rely on.

We already know that time zones play an important role and that when displaying a time we always want to show it as time-zone-aware, but even dates can have their ambiguities. If you write 3/4/2018, will it be April 3rd or March 4th?

For this reason, you usually have two choices:

  • Go for the international format (2018-04-03)
  • Localize the date (April 3, 2018)

When possible, it's obviously better to be able to localize the date format, so that our users will see a value that they can easily recognize.

How to do it...

This recipe requires the following steps:

  1. The locale module in the Python standard library provides a way to get formatting for the localization supported by your system. By using it, we can format dates in any way allowed by the target system:
import locale
import contextlib

@contextlib.contextmanager
def switchlocale(name):
    prev ...