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

Reading XML documents

The XML markup language is widely used to represent the state of objects in a serialized form. For details, see http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/. Python includes a number of libraries for parsing XML documents.

XML is called a markup language because the content of interest is marked with tags, and also written with a start <tag> and an end </tag> to clarify the structure of the data. The overall file text includes both the content and the XML markup.

Because the markup is intermingled with the text, there are some additional syntax rules that must be used to distinguish markup from text. In order to include the < character in our data, we must use XML character entity references. We must use &lt; to include < in our text. Similarly, &gt; must be used instead of >, &amp;, which is used instead of &. Additionally, &quot; is also used to embed a " character in an attribute value delimited by " characters....