Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners. 2 Ed

Title Page....2

Copyright Page....3

Dedication....6

About the Author....7

About the Technical Reviewer....8

BRIEF CONTENTS....9

CONTENTS IN DETAIL....11

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....56

INTRODUCTION....57

Whom Is This Book For?....58

Conventions....59

What Is Programming?....59

About This Book....65

Downloading and Installing Python....68

Downloading and Installing Mu....71

Starting Mu....71

Starting IDLE....72

The Interactive Shell....73

Installing Third-Party Modules....75

How to Find Help....75

Asking Smart Programming Questions....77

Summary....79

PART I: PYTHON PROGRAMMING BASICS....81

1 PYTHON BASICS....82

Entering Expressions into the Interactive Shell....83

The Integer, Floating-Point, and String Data Types....88

String Concatenation and Replication....90

Storing Values in Variables....93

Your First Program....99

Dissecting Your Program....102

Summary....113

Practice Questions....114

2 FLOW CONTROL....117

Boolean Values....119

Comparison Operators....120

Boolean Operators....124

Mixing Boolean and Comparison Operators....127

Elements of Flow Control....129

Program Execution....131

Flow Control Statements....132

Importing Modules....167

Ending a Program Early with the sys.exit() Function....170

A Short Program: Guess the Number....171

A Short Program: Rock, Paper, Scissors....176

Summary....184

Practice Questions....184

3 FUNCTIONS....187

def Statements with Parameters....190

Return Values and return Statements....192

The None Value....195

Keyword Arguments and the print() Function....196

The Call Stack....199

Local and Global Scope....203

The global Statement....210

Exception Handling....215

A Short Program: Zigzag....219

Summary....224

Practice Questions....224

Practice Projects....225

4 LISTS....228

The List Data Type....228

Working with Lists....238

Augmented Assignment Operators....248

Methods....251

Example Program: Magic 8 Ball with a List....260

Sequence Data Types....261

References....269

A Short Program: Conway’s Game of Life....279

Summary....288

Practice Questions....289

Practice Projects....291

5 DICTIONARIES AND STRUCTURING DATA....296

The Dictionary Data Type....296

Pretty Printing....309

Using Data Structures to Model Real-World Things....311

Summary....326

Practice Questions....326

Practice Projects....327

6 MANIPULATING STRINGS....331

Working with Strings....331

Putting Strings Inside Other Strings....340

Useful String Methods....342

Numeric Values of Characters with the ord() and chr() Functions....359

Copying and Pasting Strings with the pyperclip Module....361

Project: Multi-Clipboard Automatic Messages....362

Project: Adding Bullets to Wiki Markup....368

A Short Progam: Pig Latin....373

Summary....380

Practice Questions....382

Practice Projects....383

PART II: AUTOMATING TASKS....392

7 PATTERN MATCHING WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS....393

Finding Patterns of Text Without Regular Expressions....394

Finding Patterns of Text with Regular Expressions....398

More Pattern Matching with Regular Expressions....402

Greedy and Non-greedy Matching....413

The findall() Method....415

Character Classes....417

Making Your Own Character Classes....419

The Caret and Dollar Sign Characters....420

The Wildcard Character....422

Review of Regex Symbols....426

Case-Insensitive Matching....427

Substituting Strings with the sub() Method....428

Managing Complex Regexes....429

Combining re.IGNORECASE, re.DOTALL, and re.VERBOSE....430

Project: Phone Number and Email Address Extractor....432

Summary....441

Practice Questions....442

Practice Projects....445

8 INPUT VALIDATION....448

The PyInputPlus Module....450

Project: How to Keep an Idiot Busy for Hours....463

Project: Multiplication Quiz....466

Summary....470

Practice Questions....471

Practice Projects....472

9 READING AND WRITING FILES....474

Files and File Paths....474

The File Reading/Writing Process....503

Saving Variables with the shelve Module....511

Saving Variables with the pprint.pformat() Function....514

Project: Generating Random Quiz Files....516

Project: Updatable Multi-Clipboard....526

Summary....531

Practice Questions....532

Practice Projects....533

10 ORGANIZING FILES....536

The shutil Module....537

Walking a Directory Tree....544

Compressing Files with the zipfile Module....548

Project: Renaming Files with American-Style Dates to European-Style Dates....553

Project: Backing Up a Folder into a ZIP File....561

Summary....567

Practice Questions....569

Practice Projects....569

11 DEBUGGING....571

Raising Exceptions....572

Getting the Traceback as a String....576

Assertions....579

Logging....584

Mu’s Debugger....595

Summary....604

Practice Questions....605

Practice Project....606

12 WEB SCRAPING....608

Project: mapIt.py with the webbrowser Module....609

Downloading Files from the Web with the requests Module....615

Saving Downloaded Files to the Hard Drive....619

HTML....622

Parsing HTML with the bs4 Module....631

Project: Opening All Search Results....640

Project: Downloading All XKCD Comics....646

Controlling the Browser with the selenium Module....656

Summary....672

Practice Questions....672

Practice Projects....674

13 WORKING WITH EXCEL SPREADSHEETS....676

Excel Documents....677

Installing the openpyxl Module....677

Reading Excel Documents....678

Project: Reading Data from a Spreadsheet....691

Writing Excel Documents....701

Project: Updating a Spreadsheet....705

Setting the Font Style of Cells....711

Font Objects....713

Formulas....715

Adjusting Rows and Columns....717

Charts....724

Summary....727

Practice Questions....728

Practice Projects....730

14 WORKING WITH GOOGLE SHEETS....734

Installing and Setting Up EZSheets....734

Spreadsheet Objects....739

Sheet Objects....748

Working with Google Sheets Quotas....763

Summary....764

Practice Questions....765

Practice Projects....766

15 WORKING WITH PDF AND WORD DOCUMENTS....769

PDF Documents....769

Project: Combining Select Pages from Many PDFs....784

Word Documents....791

Creating PDFs from Word Documents....811

Summary....812

Practice Questions....813

Practice Projects....815

16 WORKING WITH CSV FILES AND JSON DATA....819

The csv Module....820

Project: Removing the Header from CSV Files....833

JSON and APIs....840

The json Module....842

Project: Fetching Current Weather Data....844

Summary....852

Practice Questions....853

Practice Project....854

17 KEEPING TIME, SCHEDULING TASKS, AND LAUNCHING PROGRAMS....856

The time Module....856

Rounding Numbers....861

Project: Super Stopwatch....862

The datetime Module....867

Review of Python’s Time Functions....878

Multithreading....880

Project: Multithreaded XKCD Downloader....886

Launching Other Programs from Python....892

Project: Simple Countdown Program....901

Summary....905

Practice Questions....906

Practice Projects....906

18 SENDING EMAIL AND TEXT MESSAGES....909

Sending and Receiving Email with the Gmail API....910

SMTP....919

Sending Email....920

IMAP....929

Retrieving and Deleting Emails with IMAP....929

Project: Sending Member Dues Reminder Emails....951

Sending Text Messages with SMS Email Gateways....959

Sending Text Messages with Twilio....963

Project: “Just Text Me” Module....969

Summary....971

Practice Questions....972

Practice Projects....973

19 MANIPULATING IMAGES....978

Computer Image Fundamentals....979

Manipulating Images with Pillow....984

Project: Adding a Logo....1005

Drawing on Images....1016

Summary....1024

Practice Questions....1025

Practice Projects....1026

20 CONTROLLING THE KEYBOARD AND MOUSE WITH GUI AUTOMATION....1031

Installing the pyautogui Module....1032

Setting Up Accessibility Apps on macOS....1033

Staying on Track....1034

Controlling Mouse Movement....1035

Controlling Mouse Interaction....1040

Planning Your Mouse Movements....1046

Working with the Screen....1048

Image Recognition....1052

Getting Window Information....1055

Controlling the Keyboard....1063

Setting Up Your GUI Automation Scripts....1071

Review of the PyAutoGUI Functions....1073

Project: Automatic Form Filler....1076

Displaying Message Boxes....1088

Summary....1091

Practice Questions....1092

Practice Projects....1093

A INSTALLING THIRD-PARTY MODULES....1098

The pip Tool....1098

Installing Third-Party Modules....1099

Installing Modules for the Mu Editor....1103

B RUNNING PROGRAMS....1105

Running Programs from the Terminal Window....1105

Running Python Programs on Windows....1108

Running Python Programs on macOS....1110

Running Python Programs on Ubuntu Linux....1111

Running Python Programs with Assertions Disabled....1113

C ANSWERS TO THE PRACTICE QUESTIONS....1114

Chapter 1....1114

Chapter 2....1116

Chapter 3....1119

Chapter 4....1120

Chapter 5....1122

Chapter 6....1123

Chapter 7....1124

Chapter 8....1127

Chapter 9....1127

Chapter 10....1128

Chapter 11....1129

Chapter 12....1131

Chapter 13....1133

Chapter 14....1135

Chapter 15....1135

Chapter 16....1137

Chapter 17....1137

Chapter 18....1138

Chapter 19....1139

Chapter 20....1140

INDEX....1143

Learn how to code while you write programs that effortlessly perform useful feats of automation!The second edition of this international fan favorite includes a brand-new chapter on input validation, Gmail and Google Sheets automations, tips for updating CSV files, and more.If you've ever spent hours renaming files or updating spreadsheet cells, you know how tedious tasks like these can be. But what if you could have your computer do them for you? Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, 2nd Edition teaches even the technically uninclined how to write programs that do in minutes what would take hours to do by hand—no prior coding experience required!This new, fully revised edition of Al Sweigart’s bestselling Pythonic classic, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, covers all the basics of Python 3 while exploring its rich library of modules for performing specific tasks, like scraping data off the Web, filling out forms, renaming files, organizing folders, sending email responses, and merging, splitting, or encrypting PDFs. There’s also a brand-new chapter on input validation, tutorials on automating Gmail and Google Sheets, tips on automatically updating CSV files, and other recent feats of automations that improve your efficiency.Detailed, step-by-step instructions walk you through each program, allowing you to create useful tools as you build out your programming skills, and updated practice projects at the end of each chapter challenge you to improve those programs and use your newfound skills to automate similar tasks. Boring tasks no longer have to take to get through—and neither does learning Python!