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Python Automation Cookbook

By : Jaime Buelta

5 (1)

Python Automation Cookbook

5 (1)

By: Jaime Buelta

Overview of this book

Have you been doing the same old monotonous office work over and over again? Or have you been trying to find an easy way to make your life better by automating some of your repetitive tasks? Through a tried and tested approach, understand how to automate all the boring stuff using Python. The Python Automation Cookbook helps you develop a clear understanding of how to automate your business processes using Python, including detecting opportunities by scraping the web, analyzing information to generate automatic spreadsheets reports with graphs, and communicating with automatically generated emails. You’ll learn how to get notifications via text messages and run tasks while your mind is focused on other important activities, followed by understanding how to scan documents such as résumés. Once you’ve gotten familiar with the fundamentals, you’ll be introduced to the world of graphs, along with studying how to produce organized charts using Matplotlib. In addition to this, you’ll gain in-depth knowledge of how to generate rich graphics showing relevant information. By the end of this book, you’ll have refined your skills by attaining a sound understanding of how to identify and correct problems to produce superior and reliable systems.

Preface

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Sections

Get in touch

Free Chapter

Let Us Begin Our Automation Journey

Let Us Begin Our Automation Journey

Introduction

Creating 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

Automating Tasks Made Easy

Automating Tasks Made Easy

Introduction

Preparing a task

Setting up a cron job

Capturing errors and problems

Sending email notifications

Building Your First Web Scraping Application

Building Your First Web Scraping Application

Introduction

Downloading web pages

Parsing HTML

Crawling the web

Subscribing to feeds

Accessing web APIs

Interacting with forms

Using Selenium for advanced interaction

Accessing password-protected pages

Speeding up web scraping

Searching and Reading Local Files

Searching and Reading Local Files

Introduction

Crawling and searching directories

Reading text files

Dealing with encodings

Reading CSV files

Reading log files

Reading file metadata

Reading images

Reading PDF files

Reading Word documents

Scanning documents for a keyword

Generating Fantastic Reports

Generating Fantastic Reports

Introduction

Creating a simple report in plain text

Using templates for reports

Formatting text in Markdown

Writing a basic Word document

Styling a Word document

Generating structure in Word documents

Adding pictures to Word documents

Writing a simple PDF document

Structuring a PDF

Aggregating PDF reports

Watermarking and encrypting a PDF

Fun with Spreadsheets

Fun with Spreadsheets

Introduction

Writing a CSV spreadsheet

Updating the CSV files

Reading an Excel spreadsheet

Updating an Excel spreadsheet

Creating new sheets on an Excel spreadsheet

Creating charts in Excel

Working with format in Excel

Creating a macro in LibreOffice

Developing Stunning Graphs

Developing Stunning Graphs

Introduction

Plotting a simple sales graph

Drawing stacked bars

Plotting pie charts

Displaying multiple lines

Drawing a scatter plot

Visualizing maps

Adding legends and annotations

Combining graphs

Saving charts

Dealing with Communication Channels

Dealing with Communication Channels

Introduction

Working with email templates

Sending an individual email

Reading an email

Adding subscribers to an email newsletter

Sending notifications via email

Producing SMS

Receiving SMS

Creating a Telegram bot

Why Not Automate Your Marketing Campaign?

Why Not Automate Your Marketing Campaign?

Introduction

Detecting the opportunities

Creating personalized coupon codes

Sending a notification to the customer on their preferred channel

Preparing sales information

Generating a sales report

Debugging Techniques

Debugging Techniques

Introduction

Learning Python interpreter basics

Debugging through logging

Debugging with breakpoints

Improving your debugging skills

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Preparing a task

It all starts with defining exactly what task needs to be run, and designing it in a way that doesn't require human intervention to run.

Some ideal characteristic points are as follows:

Single, clear entry point: No confusion on what the task to run is.
Clear parameters: If there are any parameters, they should be very explicit.
No interactivity: Stopping the execution to request information from the user is not possible.
The result should be stored: To be able to be checked at a different time than when it runs.
Clear result: If we are working interactively in a result, we accept more verbose results, or progress reports. But, for an automated task, the final result should be as concise and to the point as possible.
Errors should be logged: To analyze what went wrong.

A command-line program has a lot of those characteristics already. It has a clear way...

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