Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. It can be used for simple scripting or sophisticated web applications. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, this book gives you insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or a given standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with 133 recipes on the latest version of Python 3.8. The recipes will benefit everyone, from beginners just starting out with Python to experts. You'll not only learn Python programming concepts but also how to build complex applications. The recipes will touch upon all necessary Python concepts related to data structures, object oriented programming, functional programming, and statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively take advantage of it. By the end of this Python book, you will be equipped with knowledge of testing, web services, configuration, and application integration tips and tricks. You will be armed with the knowledge of how to create applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
Other Books You May Enjoy
17
Index

Reading complex formats using regular expressions

Many file formats lack the elegant regularity of a CSV file. One common file format that's rather difficult to parse is a web server log file. These files tend to have complex data without a single, uniform separator character or consistent quoting rules.

When we looked at a simplified log file in the Writing generator functions with the yield statement recipe in the online chapter, Chapter 9, Functional Programming Features (link provided in the Preface), we saw that the rows look as follows:

[2016-05-08 11:08:18,651] INFO in ch09_r09: Sample Message One 
[2016-05-08 11:08:18,651] DEBUG in ch09_r09: Debugging 
[2016-05-08 11:08:18,652] WARNING in ch09_r09: Something might have gone wrong 

There are a variety of punctuation marks being used in this file. The csv module can't handle this complexity.

We'd like to write programs with the elegant simplicity of CSV processing. This means we...