Dive Into Python

20 May 2004

This book lives at http://diveintopython.org/. If you're reading it somewhere else, you may not have the latest version.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in Appendix G, GNU Free Documentation License.

The example programs in this book are free software; you can redistribute and/or modify them under the terms of the Python license as published by the Python Software Foundation. A copy of the license is included in Appendix H, Python license.

Table of Contents

1. Installing Python
- 1.1. Which Python is right for you?
- 1.2. Python on Windows
- 1.3. Python on Mac OS X
- 1.4. Python on Mac OS 9
- 1.5. Python on RedHat Linux
- 1.6. Python on Debian GNU/Linux
- 1.7. Python Installation from Source
- 1.8. The Interactive Shell
- 1.9. Summary
2. Your First Python Program
- 2.1. Diving in
- 2.2. Declaring Functions
  - 2.2.1. How Python's Datatypes Compare to Other Programming Languages
- 2.3. Documenting Functions
- 2.4. Everything Is an Object
  - 2.4.1. The Import Search Path
  - 2.4.2. What's an Object?
- 2.5. Indenting Code
- 2.6. Testing Modules
3. Native Datatypes
- 3.1. Introducing Dictionaries
- 3.2. Introducing Lists
- 3.3. Introducing Tuples
- 3.4. Declaring variables
  - 3.4.1. Referencing Variables
  - 3.4.2. Assigning Multiple Values at Once
- 3.5. Formatting Strings
- 3.6. Mapping Lists
- 3.7. Joining Lists and Splitting Strings
  - 3.7.1. Historical Note on String Methods
- 3.8. Summary
4. The Power Of Introspection
- 4.1. Diving In
- 4.2. Using Optional and Named Arguments
- 4.3. Using type, str, dir, and Other Built-In Functions
- 4.4. Getting Object References With getattr
  - 4.4.1. getattr with Modules
  - 4.4.2. getattr As a Dispatcher
- 4.5. Filtering Lists
- 4.6. The Peculiar Nature of and and or
  - 4.6.1. Using the and-or Trick
- 4.7. Using lambda Functions
  - 4.7.1. Real-World lambda Functions
- 4.8. Putting It All Together
- 4.9. Summary
5. Objects and Object-Orientation
- 5.1. Diving In
- 5.2. Importing Modules Using from module import
- 5.3. Defining Classes
  - 5.3.1. Initializing and Coding Classes
  - 5.3.2. Knowing When to Use self and __init__
- 5.4. Instantiating Classes
  - 5.4.1. Garbage Collection
- 5.5. Exploring UserDict: A Wrapper Class
- 5.6. Special Class Methods
  - 5.6.1. Getting and Setting Items
- 5.7. Advanced Special Class Methods
- 5.8. Introducing Class Attributes
- 5.9. Private Functions
- 5.10. Summary
6. Exceptions and File Handling
- 6.1. Handling Exceptions
  - 6.1.1. Using Exceptions For Other Purposes
- 6.2. Working with File Objects
- 6.3. Iterating with for Loops
- 6.4. Using sys.modules
- 6.5. Working with Directories
- 6.6. Putting It All Together
- 6.7. Summary
7. Regular Expressions
- 7.1. Diving In
- 7.2. Case Study: Street Addresses
- 7.3. Case Study: Roman Numerals
  - 7.3.1. Checking for Thousands
  - 7.3.2. Checking for Hundreds
- 7.4. Using the {n,m} Syntax
  - 7.4.1. Checking for Tens and Ones
- 7.5. Verbose Regular Expressions
- 7.6. Case study: Parsing Phone Numbers
- 7.7. Summary
8. HTML Processing
- 8.1. Diving in
- 8.2. Introducing sgmllib.py
- 8.3. Extracting data from HTML documents
- 8.4. Introducing BaseHTMLProcessor.py
- 8.5. locals and globals
- 8.6. Dictionary-based string formatting
- 8.7. Quoting attribute values
- 8.8. Introducing dialect.py
- 8.9. Putting it all together
- 8.10. Summary
9. XML Processing
- 9.1. Diving in
- 9.2. Packages
- 9.3. Parsing XML
- 9.4. Unicode
- 9.5. Searching for elements
- 9.6. Accessing element attributes
- 9.7. Segue
10. Scripts and Streams
- 10.1. Abstracting input sources
- 10.2. Standard input, output, and error
- 10.3. Caching node lookups
- 10.4. Finding direct children of a node
- 10.5. Creating separate handlers by node type
- 10.6. Handling command-line arguments
- 10.7. Putting it all together
- 10.8. Summary
11. HTTP Web Services
- 11.1. Diving in
- 11.2. How not to fetch data over HTTP
- 11.3. Features of HTTP
- 11.4. Debugging HTTP web services
- 11.5. Setting the User-Agent
- 11.6. Handling Last-Modified and ETag
- 11.7. Handling redirects
- 11.8. Handling compressed data
- 11.9. Putting it all together
- 11.10. Summary
12. SOAP Web Services
- 12.1. Diving In
- 12.2. Installing the SOAP Libraries
- 12.3. First Steps with SOAP
- 12.4. Debugging SOAP Web Services
- 12.5. Introducing WSDL
- 12.6. Introspecting SOAP Web Services with WSDL
- 12.7. Searching Google
- 12.8. Troubleshooting SOAP Web Services
- 12.9. Summary
13. Unit Testing
- 13.1. Introduction to Roman numerals
- 13.2. Diving in
- 13.3. Introducing romantest.py
- 13.4. Testing for success
- 13.5. Testing for failure
- 13.6. Testing for sanity
14. Test-First Programming
- 14.1. roman.py, stage 1
- 14.2. roman.py, stage 2
- 14.3. roman.py, stage 3
- 14.4. roman.py, stage 4
- 14.5. roman.py, stage 5
15. Refactoring
- 15.1. Handling bugs
- 15.2. Handling changing requirements
- 15.3. Refactoring
- 15.4. Postscript
- 15.5. Summary
16. Functional Programming
- 16.1. Diving in
- 16.2. Finding the path
- 16.3. Filtering lists revisited
- 16.4. Mapping lists revisited
- 16.5. Data-centric programming
- 16.6. Dynamically importing modules
- 16.7. Putting it all together
- 16.8. Summary
17. Dynamic functions
- 17.1. Diving in
- 17.2. plural.py, stage 1
- 17.3. plural.py, stage 2
- 17.4. plural.py, stage 3
- 17.5. plural.py, stage 4
- 17.6. plural.py, stage 5
- 17.7. plural.py, stage 6
- 17.8. Summary
18. Performance Tuning
- 18.1. Diving in
- 18.2. Using the timeit Module
- 18.3. Optimizing Regular Expressions
- 18.4. Optimizing Dictionary Lookups
- 18.5. Optimizing List Operations
- 18.6. Optimizing String Manipulation
- 18.7. Summary
A. Further reading
B. A 5-minute review
C. Tips and tricks
D. List of examples
E. Revision history
F. About the book
G. GNU Free Documentation License
- G.0. Preamble
- G.1. Applicability and definitions
- G.2. Verbatim copying
- G.3. Copying in quantity
- G.4. Modifications
- G.5. Combining documents
- G.6. Collections of documents
- G.7. Aggregation with independent works
- G.8. Translation
- G.9. Termination
- G.10. Future revisions of this license
- G.11. How to use this License for your documents
H. Python license
- H.A. History of the software
- H.B. Terms and conditions for accessing or otherwise using Python