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 HTML documents

A great deal of content on the web is presented using HTML markup. A browser renders the data very nicely. How can we parse this data to extract the meaningful content from the displayed web page?

We can use the standard library html.parser module, but it's not as helpful as we'd like. It only provides low-level lexical scanning information; it doesn't provide a high-level data structure that describes the original web page.

Instead, we'll use the Beautiful Soup module to parse HTML pages into more useful data structures. This is available from the Python Package Index (PyPI). See https://pypi.python.org/pypi/beautifulsoup4.

This must be downloaded and installed. Often, this is as simple as doing the following:

python -m pip install beautifulsoup4

Using the python -m pip command ensures that we will use the pip command that goes with the currently active virtual environment.

Getting ready

We've gathered some...