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Python Automation Cookbook

You're reading from   Python Automation Cookbook 75 Python automation recipes for web scraping; data wrangling; and Excel, report, and email processing

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Product type Paperback
Published in May 2020
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781800207080
Length 526 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
Tools
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Author (1):
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Jaime Buelta Jaime Buelta
Author Profile Icon Jaime Buelta
Jaime Buelta
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Table of Contents (16) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Let's Begin Our Automation Journey 2. Automating Tasks Made Easy FREE CHAPTER 3. Building Your First Web Scraping Application 4. Searching and Reading Local Files 5. Generating Fantastic Reports 6. Fun with Spreadsheets 7. Cleaning and Processing Data 8. Developing Stunning Graphs 9. Dealing with Communication Channels 10. Why Not Automate Your Marketing Campaign? 11. Machine Learning for Automation 12. Automatic Testing Routines 13. Debugging Techniques 14. Other Books You May Enjoy
15. Index

Let's Begin Our Automation Journey

The objective of this chapter is to lay down some of the basic techniques that will be useful throughout the whole book. The main idea is to create a good Python environment to run the automation tasks that follow and be able to parse text inputs into structured data.

Python has a good number of tools installed by default, but it also makes it easy to install third-party tools that can simplify many common operations. We'll see how to import modules from external sources and use them to leverage the full potential of Python.

We will install and use tools to help process texts. The ability to structure input data is critical in any automation task. Most of the data that we will process in this book will come from unformatted sources such as web pages or text files. As the old computer adage says, garbage in, garbage out, making the sanitizing of inputs a very important task.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following recipes:

  • Activating a virtual environment
  • Installing third-party packages
  • Creating strings with formatted values
  • Manipulating strings
  • Extracting data from structured strings
  • Using a third-party tool—parse
  • Introducing regular expressions
  • Going deeper into regular expressions
  • Adding command-line arguments

We will start by creating our own self-contained environment to work in.

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