Full Description
Portable, powerful, and a breeze to use, Python is the popular open source object-oriented programming language used for both standalone programs and scripting applications. It is now being used by an increasing number of major organizations, including NASA and Google. Updated for Python 2.4, The Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition offers a wealth of useful code for all Python programmers, not just advanced practitioners. Like its predecessor, the new edition provides solutions to problems that Python programmers face everyday.
It now includes over 200 recipes that range from simple tasks, such as working with dictionaries and list comprehensions, to complex tasks, such as monitoring a network and building a templating system. This revised version also includes new chapters on topics such as time, money, and metaprogramming.
Here's a list of additional topics covered:
Manipulating text
Searching and sorting
Working with files and the filesystem
Object-oriented programming
Dealing with threads and processes
System administration
Interacting with databases
Creating user interfaces
Network and web programming
Processing XML
Distributed programming
Debugging and testing
Another advantage of The Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition is its trio of authors--three well-known Python programming experts, who are highly visible on email lists and in newsgroups, and speak often at Python conferences.
With scores of practical examples and pertinent background information, The Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition is the one source you need if you're looking to build efficient, flexible, scalable, and well-integrated systems.
Table of Contents
Preface
1. Text
1.1 Processing a String One Character at a Time
1.2 Converting Between Characters and Numeric Codes
1.3 Testing Whether an Object Is String-like
1.4 Aligning Strings
1.5 Trimming Space from the Ends of a String
1.6 Combining Strings
1.7 Reversing a String by Words or Characters
1.8 Checking Whether a String Contains a Set of Characters
1.9 Simplifying Usage of Strings' translate Method
1.10 Filtering a String for a Set of Characters
1.11 Checking Whether a String Is Text or Binary
1.12 Controlling Case
1.13 Accessing Substrings
1.14 Changing the Indentation of a Multiline String
1.15 Expanding and Compressing Tabs
1.16 Interpolating Variables in a String
1.17 Interpolating Variables in a String in Python 2.4
1.18 Replacing Multiple Patterns in a Single Pass
1.19 Checking a String for Any of Multiple Endings
1.20 Handling International Text with Unicode
1.21 Converting Between Unicode and Plain Strings
1.22 Printing Unicode Characters to Standard Output
1.23 Encoding Unicode Data for XML and HTML
1.24 Making Some Strings Case-Insensitive
1.25 Converting HTML Documents to Text on a Unix Terminal
2. Files
2.1 Reading from a File
2.2 Writing to a File
2.3 Searching and Replacing Text in a File
2.4 Reading a Specific Line from a File
2.5 Counting Lines in a File
2.6 Processing Every Word in a File
2.7 Using Random-Access Input/Output
2.8 Updating a Random-Access File
2.9 Reading Data from zip Files
2.10 Handling a zip File Inside a String
2.11 Archiving a Tree of Files into a Compressed tar File
2.12 Sending Binary Data to Standard Output Under Windows
2.13 Using a C++-like iostream Syntax
2.14 Rewinding an Input File to the Beginning
2.15 Adapting a File-like Object to a True File Object
2.16 Walking Directory Trees
2.17 Swapping One File Extension for AnotherThroughout a Directory Tree
2.18 Finding a File Given a Search Path
2.19 Finding Files Given a Search Path and a Pattern
2.20 Finding a File on the Python Search Path
2.21 Dynamically Changing the Python Search Path
2.22 Computing the Relative Path from One Directory to Another
2.23 Reading an Unbuffered Character in a Cross-Platform Way
2.24 Counting Pages of PDF Documents on Mac OS X
2.25 Changing File Attributes on Windows
2.26 Extracting Text from OpenOffice.org Documents
2.27 Extracting Text from Microsoft Word Documents
2.28 File Locking Using a Cross-Platform API
2.29 Versioning Filenames
2.30 Calculating CRC-64 Cyclic Redundancy Checks
3. Time and Money
3.1 Calculating Yesterday and Tomorrow
3.2 Finding Last Friday
3.3 Calculating Time Periods in a Date Range
3.4 Summing Durations of Songs
3.5 Calculating the Number of Weekdays Between Two Dates
3.6 Looking up Holidays Automatically
3.7 Fuzzy Parsing of Dates
3.8 Checking Whether Daylight Saving Time Is Currently in Effect
3.9 Converting Time Zones
3.10 Running a Command Repeatedly
3.11 Scheduling Commands
3.12 Doing Decimal Arithmetic
3.13 Formatting Decimals as Currency
3.14 Using Python as a Simple Adding Machine
3.15 Checking a Credit Card Checksum
3.16 Watching Foreign Exchange Rates
4. Python Shortcuts
4.1 Copying an Object
4.2 Constructing Lists with List Comprehensions
4.3 Returning an Element of a List If It Exists
4.4 Looping over Items and Their Indices in a Sequence
4.5 Creating Lists of Lists Without Sharing References
4.6 Flattening a Nested Sequence
4.7 Removing or Reordering Columns in a List of Rows
4.8 Transposing Two-Dimensional Arrays
4.9 Getting a Value from a Dictionary
4.10 Adding an Entry to a Dictionary
4.11 Building a Dictionary Without Excessive Quoting
4.12 Building a Dict from a List of Alternating Keys and Values
4.13 Extracting a Subset of a Dictionary
4.14 Inverting a Dictionary
4.15 Associating Multiple Values with Each Key in a Dictionary
4.16 Using a Dictionary to Dispatch Methods or Functions
4.17 Finding Unions and Intersections of Dictionaries
4.18 Collecting a Bunch of Named Items
4.19 Assigning and Testing with One Statement
4.20 Using printf in Python
4.21 Randomly Picking Items with Given Probabilities
4.22 Handling Exceptions Within an Expression
4.23 Ensuring a Name Is Defined in a Given Module
5. Searching and Sorting
5.1 Sorting a Dictionary
5.2 Sorting a List of Strings Case-Insensitively
5.3 Sorting a List of Objects by an Attribute of the Objects
5.4 Sorting Keys or Indices Based on the Corresponding Values
5.5 Sorting Strings with Embedded Numbers
5.6 Processing All of a List's Items in Random Order
5.7 Keeping a Sequence Ordered as Items Are Added
5.8 Getting the First Few Smallest Items of a Sequence
5.9 Looking for Items in a Sorted Sequence
5.10 Selecting the nth Smallest Element of a Sequence
5.11 Showing off quicksort in Three Lines
5.12 Performing Frequent Membership Tests on a Sequence
5.13 Finding Subsequences
5.14 Enriching the Dictionary Type with Ratings Functionality
5.15 Sorting Names and Separating Them by Initials
6. Object-Oriented Programming
6.1 Converting Among Temperature Scales
6.2 Defining Constants
6.3 Restricting Attribute Setting
6.4 Chaining Dictionary Lookups
6.5 Delegating Automatically as an Alternative to Inheritance
6.6 Delegating Special Methods in Proxies
6.7 Implementing Tuples with Named Items
6.8 Avoiding Boilerplate Accessors for Properties
6.9 Making a Fast Copy of an Object
6.10 Keeping References to Bound MethodsWithout Inhibiting Garbage Collection
6.11 Implementing a Ring Buffer
6.12 Checking an Instance for Any State Changes
6.13 Checking Whether an Object Has Necessary Attributes
6.14 Implementing the State Design Pattern
6.15 Implementing the 'Singleton' Design Pattern
6.16 Avoiding the 'Singleton' Design Pattern with the Borg Idiom
6.17 Implementing the Null Object Design Pattern
6.18 Automatically Initializing Instance Variablesfrom -- --init-- -- Arguments
6.19 Calling a Superclass -- --init-- -- Method If It Exists
6.20 Using Cooperative Supercalls Concisely and Safely
7. Persistence and Databases
7.1 Serializing Data Using the marshal Module
7.2 Serializing Data Using the pickle and cPickle Modules
7.3 Using Compression with Pickling
7.4 Using the cPickle Module on Classes and Instances
7.5 Holding Bound Methods in a Picklable Way
7.6 Pickling Code Objects
7.7 Mutating Objects with shelve
7.8 Using the Berkeley DB Database
7.9 Accesssing a MySQL Database
7.10 Storing a BLOB in a MySQL Database
7.11 Storing a BLOB in a PostgreSQL Database
7.12 Storing a BLOB in a SQLite Database
7.13 Generating a Dictionary Mapping Field Names to Column Numbers
7.14 Using dtuple for Flexible Accessto Query Results
7.15 Pretty-Printing the Contents of Database Cursors
7.16 Using a Single Parameter-Passing StyleAcross Various DB API Modules
7.17 Using Microsoft Jet via ADO
7.18 Accessing a JDBC Database from a Jython Servlet
7.19 Using ODBC to Get Excel Data with Jython
8. Debugging and Testing
8.1 Disabling Execution of Some Conditionals and Loops
8.2 Measuring Memory Usage on Linux
8.3 Debugging the Garbage-Collection Process
8.4 Trapping and Recording Exceptions
8.5 Tracing Expressions and Comments in Debug Mode
8.6 Getting More Information from Tracebacks
8.7 Starting the Debugger Automatically After an Uncaught Exception
8.8 Running Unit Tests Most Simply
8.9 Running Unit Tests Automatically
8.10 Using doctest with unittest in Python 2.4
8.11 Checking Values Against Intervals in Unit Testing
9. Processes, Threads, and Synchronization
9.1 Synchronizing All Methods in an Object
9.2 Terminating a Thread
9.3 Using a Queue.Queue as a Priority Queue
9.4 Working with a Thread Pool
9.5 Executing a Function in Parallel on Multiple Argument Sets
9.6 Coordinating Threads by Simple Message Passing
9.7 Storing Per-Thread Information
9.8 Multitasking Cooperatively Without Threads
9.9 Determining Whether Another Instance of a ScriptIs Already Running in Windows
9.10 Processing Windows Messages Using MsgWaitForMultipleObjects
9.11 Driving an External Process with popen
9.12 Capturing the Output and Error Streamsfrom a Unix Shell Command
9.13 Forking a Daemon Process on Unix
10. System Administration
10.1 Generating Random Passwords
10.2 Generating Easily Remembered Somewhat-Random Passwords
10.3 Authenticating Users by Means of a POP Server
10.4 Calculating Apache Hits per IP Address
10.5 Calculating the Rate of Client Cache Hits on Apache
10.6 Spawning an Editor from a Script
10.7 Backing Up Files
10.8 Selectively Copying a Mailbox File
10.9 Building a Whitelist of Email Addresses From a Mailbox
10.10 Blocking Duplicate Mails
10.11 Checking Your Windows Sound System
10.12 Registering or Unregistering a DLL on Windows
10.13 Checking and Modifying the Set of Tasks WindowsAutomatically Runs at Login
10.14 Creating a Share on Windows
10.15 Connecting to an Already Running Instance of Internet Explorer
10.16 Reading Microsoft Outlook Contacts
10.17 Gathering Detailed System Information on Mac OS X
11. User Interfaces
11.1 Showing a Progress Indicator on a Text Console
11.2 Avoiding lambda in Writing Callback Functions
11.3 Using Default Values and Bounds with tkSimpleDialog Functions
11.4 Adding Drag and Drop Reordering to a Tkinter Listbox
11.5 Entering Accented Characters in Tkinter Widgets
11.6 Embedding Inline GIFs Using Tkinter
11.7 Converting Among Image Formats
11.8 Implementing a Stopwatch in Tkinter
11.9 Combining GUIs and Asynchronous I/O with Threads
11.10 Using IDLE's Tree Widget in Tkinter
11.11 Supporting Multiple Values per Row in a Tkinter Listbox
11.12 Copying Geometry Methods and Options Between Tkinter Widgets
11.13 Implementing a Tabbed Notebook for Tkinter
11.14 Using a wxPython Notebook with Panels
11.15 Implementing an ImageJ Plug-in in Jython
11.16 Viewing an Image from a URL with Swing and Jython
11.17 Getting User Input on Mac OS
11.18 Building a Python Cocoa GUI Programmatically
11.19 Implementing Fade-in Windows with IronPython
12. Processing XML
12.1 Checking XML Well-Formedness
12.2 Counting Tags in a Document
12.3 Extracting Text from an XML Document
12.4 Autodetecting XML Encoding
12.5 Converting an XML Document into a Tree of Python Objects
12.6 Removing Whitespace-only Text Nodesfrom an XML DOM Node's Subtree
12.7 Parsing Microsoft Excel's XML
12.8 Validating XML Documents
12.9 Filtering Elements and Attributes Belonging to a Given Namespace
12.10 Merging Continuous Text Events with a SAX Filter
12.11 Using MSHTML to Parse XML or HTML
13. Network Programming
13.1 Passing Messages with Socket Datagrams
13.2 Grabbing a Document from the Web
13.3 Filtering a List of FTP Sites
13.4 Getting Time from a Server via the SNTP Protocol
13.5 Sending HTML Mail
13.6 Bundling Files in a MIME Message
13.7 Unpacking a Multipart MIME Message
13.8 Removing Attachments from an Email Message
13.9 Fixing Messages Parsed by Python 2.4 email.FeedParser
13.10 Inspecting a POP3 Mailbox Interactively
13.11 Detecting Inactive Computers
13.12 Monitoring a Network with HTTP
13.13 Forwarding and Redirecting Network Ports
13.14 Tunneling SSL Through a Proxy
13.15 Implementing the Dynamic IP Protocol
13.16 Connecting to IRC and Logging Messages to Disk
13.17 Accessing LDAP Servers
14. Web Programming
14.1 Testing Whether CGI Is Working
14.2 Handling URLs Within a CGI Script
14.3 Uploading Files with CGI
14.4 Checking for a Web Page's Existence
14.5 Checking Content Type via HTTP
14.6 Resuming the HTTP Download of a File
14.7 Handling Cookies While Fetching Web Pages
14.8 Authenticating with a Proxy for HTTPS Navigation
14.9 Running a Servlet with Jython
14.10 Finding an Internet Explorer Cookie
14.11 Generating OPML Files
14.12 Aggregating RSS Feeds
14.13 Turning Data into Web Pages Through Templates
14.14 Rendering Arbitrary Objects with Nevow
15. Distributed Programming
15.1 Making an XML-RPC Method Call
15.2 Serving XML-RPC Requests
15.3 Using XML-RPC with Medusa
15.4 Enabling an XML-RPC Server to Be Terminated Remotely
15.5 Implementing SimpleXMLRPCServer Niceties
15.6 Giving an XML-RPC Server a wxPython GUI
15.7 Using Twisted Perspective Broker
15.8 Implementing a CORBA Server and Client
15.9 Performing Remote Logins Using telnetlib
15.10 Performing Remote Logins with SSH
15.11 Authenticating an SSL Client over HTTPS
16. Programs About Programs
16.1 Verifying Whether a String Represents a Valid Number
16.2 Importing a Dynamically Generated Module
16.3 Importing from a Module Whose Name Is Determined at Runtime
16.4 Associating Parameters with a Function (Currying)
16.5 Composing Functions
16.6 Colorizing Python Source Using the Built-in Tokenizer
16.7 Merging and Splitting Tokens
16.8 Checking Whether a String Has Balanced Parentheses
16.9 Simulating Enumerations in Python
16.10 Referring to a List Comprehension While Building It
16.11 Automating the py2exe Compilationof Scripts into Windows Executables
16.12 Binding Main Script and Modules into One Executable on Unix
17. Extending and Embedding
17.1 Implementing a Simple Extension Type
17.2 Implementing a Simple Extension Type with Pyrex
17.3 Exposing a C++ Library to Python
17.4 Calling Functions from a Windows DLL
17.5 Using SWIG-Generated Modules in a Multithreaded Environment
17.6 Translating a Python Sequence into a C Arraywith the PySequence--Fast Protocol
17.7 Accessing a Python Sequence Item-by-Item with the Iterator Protocol
17.8 Returning None from a Python-Callable C Function
17.9 Debugging Dynamically Loaded C Extensions with gdb
17.10 Debugging Memory Problems
18. Algorithms
18.1 Removing Duplicates from a Sequence
18.2 Removing Duplicates from a SequenceWhile Maintaining Sequence Order
18.3 Generating Random Samples with Replacement
18.4 Generating Random Samples Without Replacement
18.5 Memoizing (Caching) the Return Values of Functions
18.6 Implementing a FIFO Container
18.7 Caching Objects with a FIFO Pruning Strategy
18.8 Implementing a Bag (Multiset) Collection Type
18.9 Simulating the Ternary Operator in Python
18.10 Computing Prime Numbers
18.11 Formatting Integers as Binary Strings
18.12 Formatting Integers as Strings in Arbitrary Bases
18.13 Converting Numbers to Rationals via Farey Fractions
18.14 Doing Arithmetic with Error Propagation
18.15 Summing Numbers with Maximal Accuracy
18.16 Simulating Floating Point
18.17 Computing the Convex Hulls and Diameters of 2D Point Sets
19. Iterators and Generators
19.1 Writing a range-like Function with Float Increments
19.2 Building a List from Any Iterable
19.3 Generating the Fibonacci Sequence
19.4 Unpacking a Few Items in a Multiple Assignment
19.5 Automatically Unpacking the Needed Number of Items
19.6 Dividing an Iterable into n Slices of Stride n
19.7 Looping on a Sequence by Overlapping Windows
19.8 Looping Through Multiple Iterables in Parallel
19.9 Looping Through the Cross-Product of Multiple Iterables
19.10 Reading a Text File by Paragraphs
19.11 Reading Lines with Continuation Characters
19.12 Iterating on a Stream of Data Blocks as a Stream of Lines
19.13 Fetching Large Record Sets from a Database with a Generator
19.14 Merging Sorted Sequences
19.15 Generating Permutations, Combinations, and Selections
19.16 Generating the Partitions of an Integer
19.17 Duplicating an Iterator
19.18 Looking Ahead into an Iterator
19.19 Simplifying Queue-Consumer Threads
19.20 Running an Iterator in Another Thread
19.21 Computing a Summary Report with itertools.groupby
20. Descriptors, Decorators, and Metaclasses
20.1 Getting Fresh Default Values at Each Function Call
20.2 Coding Properties as Nested Functions
20.3 Aliasing Attribute Values
20.4 Caching Attribute Values
20.5 Using One Method as Accessor for Multiple Attributes
20.6 Adding Functionality to a Class by Wrapping a Method
20.7 Adding Functionality to a Class by Enriching All Methods
20.8 Adding a Method to a Class Instance at Runtime
20.9 Checking Whether Interfaces Are Implemented
20.10 Using -- --new-- -- and -- --init-- -- Appropriately in Custom Metaclasses
20.11 Allowing Chaining of Mutating List Methods
20.12 Using Cooperative Supercalls with Terser Syntax
20.13 Initializing Instance Attributes Without Using -- --init-- --
20.14 Automatic Initialization of Instance Attributes
20.15 Upgrading Class Instances Automatically on reload
20.16 Binding Constants at Compile Time
20.17 Solving Metaclass Conflicts
Index
