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
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17
Index

Testing things that involve dates or times

Many applications rely on functions like datetime.datetime.now() or time.time() to create a timestamp. When we use one of these functions with a unit test, the results are essentially impossible to predict. This is an interesting dependency injection problem here: our application depends on a class that we would like to replace only when we're testing. The datetime package must be tested separately and a replacement used when testing our application.

One option is to design our application to avoid now() and utcnow(). Instead of using these methods directly, we can create a factory function that emits timestamps. For test purposes, this function can be replaced with one that produces known results. It seems awkward to avoid using the now() method in a complex application.

Another option is to avoid direct use of the datetime class entirely. This requires designing classes and modules that wrap the datetime class. A...