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

Parsing the URL path

A URL is a complex object. It contains at least six separate pieces of information. More data can be included via optional elements.

A URL such as http://127.0.0.1:5000/dealer/hand/player_1?$format=json has several fields:

  • http is the scheme. https is for secure connections using encrypted sockets.
  • 127.0.0.1 can be called the authority, although network location is more commonly used.
  • 5000 is the port number and is often considered to be part of the authority.
  • /dealer/hand/player_1 is the path to a resource.
  • $format=json is a query string.

The path to a resource can be quite complex. It's common in RESTful web services to use the path information to identify groups of resources, individual resources, and even relationships among resources.

In this recipe, we'll see how Flask lets us parse complex URL patterns.

Getting ready

Most web services provide access to some kind of resource. In the Using...