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

Crawling and searching directories

In this recipe, we'll learn how to scan a directory recursively to get all the files contained there. That will include all the files in subdirectories. The matched files can be of a particular kind, like text files, or every single one of them.

This is normally a starting operation when dealing with files, to detect all the existing ones.

Getting ready

Let's start by creating a test directory with some file information:

$ mkdir dir
$ touch dir/file1.txt
$ touch dir/file2.txt
$ mkdir dir/subdir
$ touch dir/subdir/file3.txt
$ touch dir/subdir/file4.txt
$ touch dir/subdir/file5.pdf
$ touch dir/file6.pdf

All the files will be empty; we will use them in this recipe only to discover them. Notice there are four files that have a .txt extension, and two that have a .pdf extension.

The files are also available in the GitHub repository here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Python-Automation-Cookbook-Second...