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

Dealing with encodings

Text files can be present in different encodings. In recent years, the situation has greatly improved, as there are a few encodings that are pretty standard, but there are still compatibility problems when working with different systems.

There's a difference between raw data in a file and a string object in Python. The string object has been transformed from whatever encoding the file contained into a native Unicode string. Once it is in this format, it may need to be stored in different encodings. By default, Python works with the encoding defined by the OS, which in modern operating systems is UTF-8. This is a highly compatible encoding, but you may need to save files in a different one, depending on your specific requirements.

Getting ready

We prepared two files in the GitHub repository that store the string 20£ in two different encodings: one in the usual UTF-8 and another in ISO 8859-1, a different common encoding...