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
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15
Index

Searching and Reading Local Files

In this chapter, we will introduce the basic operations to read information from files, starting with searching and opening files stored in different directories and subdirectories. Then, we'll describe some of the most common file types and how to read them, including formats such as raw text files, PDFs, and Word documents.

The last recipe will search for a word inside different kinds of files, recursively in a directory tree.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following recipes:

  • Crawling and searching directories
  • Reading text files
  • Dealing with encodings
  • Reading CSV files
  • Reading log files
  • Reading file metadata
  • Reading images
  • Reading PDF files
  • Reading Word documents
  • Scanning documents for a keyword

We will start by accessing all the files in a directory tree.