Book Image

Python Automation Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Jaime Buelta
Book Image

Python Automation Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Jaime Buelta

Overview of this book

In this updated and extended version of Python Automation Cookbook, each chapter now comprises the newest recipes and is revised to align with Python 3.8 and higher. The book includes three new chapters that focus on using Python for test automation, machine learning projects, and for working with messy data. This edition will enable you to develop a sharp understanding of the fundamentals required to automate business processes through real-world tasks, such as developing your first web scraping application, analyzing information to generate spreadsheet reports with graphs, and communicating with automatically generated emails. Once you grasp the basics, you will acquire the practical knowledge to create stunning graphs and charts using Matplotlib, generate rich graphics with relevant information, automate marketing campaigns, build machine learning projects, and execute debugging techniques. By the end of this book, you will be proficient in identifying monotonous tasks and resolving process inefficiencies to produce superior and reliable systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
14
Other Books You May Enjoy
15
Index

Subscribing to feeds

RSS is probably the biggest secret of the internet. Its time in the spotlight seemed to be during the 2000s, and it enables easy subscription to websites. It is present in lots of websites 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 publishing times. This makes for a very natural way of learning 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 Atom and RSS are more or less the same. feedparser is also capable of parsing Atom, so both formats can be processed in the same way.

Getting ready

We need...