Automation with Python

Prerequisites

No specific pre-requisites. Previous programming experience an advantage.

Python basics

• The Python environment
• Variables
• Keywords
• Built in functions
• Variable types

Flow Control

• if and elif
• Conditional expressions
• Relational operators
• Boolean operators
• while loops
• Alternate ways to exit a loop

Functions

• Defining a function
• Function parameters
• Global variables
• Variable scope
• Returning values

Lists and Tuples

• About sequences
• Lists
• Tuples
• Indexing and slicing
• Iterating through a sequence
• Functions for all sequences
• Using enumerate
• Operators and keywords for sequences
• The xrange() function
• Nested sequences
• List comprehensions
• Generator expressions

Working with files

• Text file I/O
• Opening a text file
• The with block
• Reading a text file
• Writing to a text file
• "Binary" (raw, or non-delimited) data

Exception handling

• Exceptions
• Handling exceptions with try
• Handling multiple exceptions
• Handling generic exceptions
• Ignoring exceptions
• Using else
• Cleaning up with finally
• re-raising exceptions
• Raising a new exception
• The standard exception hierarchy

Dictionaries and sets

• About dictionaries
• When to use dictionaries
• Creating dictionaries
• Getting dictionary values
• Iterating through a dictionary
• Reading file data into a dictionary
• Counting with dictionaries
• About sets
• Creating sets
• Working with sets

Classes

• Defining classes
• Instance objects
• Instance attributes
• Methods
• __init__
• Properties
• Class data
• Inheritance
• Multiple Inheritance
• Base classes
• Special methods
• Pseudo-private variables
• Static methods

OS Commands

• shutil Module and File Copies
• Deletion
• Walking the tree
• Playing with zip files
• Extracting from zips
• Creating zip files
• The os module
• Scheduling tasks
• Environment variables
• Launching external processes
• Paths, directories, and filenames
• Walking directory trees
• Dates and times

Pattern Matching with Regular Expressions

• Creating regex Objects
• Multiple Matching Groups with |
• zero or one match ?
• zero or more match *
• one or more +
• Repetitions {}
• Greedy Matches & findall
• Character Classes
• Matching Newlines
• Review of regex Symbols

XML and JSON Processing

• Loading XML data
• Traversing document tree
• Searching XML document
• Writing XML output
• Reading and Writing JSON output

Working with Excel

• Working with Excel
• example.xlsx
• Getting Sheets from the Workbook
• Getting Cells from the Sheets
• Getting Rows and Columns from Sheets
• Writing Excel Documents
• Playing with Fonts
• Dimensions
• Merging Cells

Working with PDF & word documents

• Working with .pdf & .docx
• Extracting Text from PDFs
• Rotating PDFs
• Reading Word Documents
• Driving the styles
• Writing Word Documents

Web scraping

• Web Scraping
• webbrowser module
• requests module
• BeautifulSoup
• CSS Selectors
• Finding an Element with the select() Method
• Getting data from an Element’s Attributes
• Controlling your browser with Selenium

Working with CSV and JSON

• Working with CSV and JSON
• Extracting Text from CSV files
• Reader Objects in a for Loop
• Writer Objects
• Delimiters and line terminators
• Reading JSON with loads()
• Writing JSON with the dumps()
• REST APIs and JSON
• REST API returns

Keeping Time, Scheduling Task & Launching Programs

• time Module
• datetime Module
• timedelta
• datetime conversion to strings
• strings to datetime objects
• Threading

Sending Email & text messages

• smtplib Module
• imapclient Module
• pyzmail Module
• Searching Email
• twilio

Networking with Python

• Sockets
• Sending/receiving messages