Beginning Python - From Novice to Professional

CHAPTER 10 ■ BATTERIES INCLUDED 251
Even though this template system is capable of some quite powerful substitutions, it still has some flaws. For
example, it would be nice if you could write the definition file in a more flexible manner. If it were executed with
execfile, you could simply use normal Python syntax. That would also fix the problem of getting lots of blank lines
at the top of the output.
Can you think of other ways of improving it? Can you think of other uses for the concepts used in this program? The
best way (in my opinion) to become really proficient in any programming language is to play with it—test its limitations
and discover its strengths. See if you can rewrite this program so it works better and suits your needs.
■Note There is, in fact, a perfectly good template system available in the standard libraries, in the string
module. Just take a look at the Template class, for example.
Other Interesting Standard Modules
Even though this chapter has covered a lot of material, I have barely scratched the surface of
the standard libraries. To tempt you to dive in, I’ll quickly mention a few more cool libraries:
difflib. This library enables you to compute how similar two sequences are. It also enables
you to find the sequences (from a list of possibilities) that are “most similar” to an original
sequence you provide. difflib could be used to create a simple searching program, for
example.
md5 and sha. These modules can compute small “signatures” (numbers) from strings;
and if you compute the signatures for two different strings, you can be almost certain that
the two signatures will be different. You can use this on large text files. These modules have
several uses in cryptography and security.
csv. CSV is short for comma-separated values, a simple format used by many applications
(for example, many spreadsheets and database programs) to store tabular data. It is mainly
used when exchanging data between different programs. The csv module lets you read
and write CSV files easily, and it handles some of the more tricky parts of the format quite
transparently.
timeit, profile, and trace. The timeit module (with its accompanying command-line
script) is a tool for measuring the time a piece of code takes to run. It has some tricks up its
sleeve, and you probably ought to use it rather than the time module for performance
measurements. The profile module (along with its companion module, pstats) can be
used for a more comprehensive analysis of the efficiency of a piece of code. The trace
module (and program) can give you a coverage analysis (that is, which parts of your code
are executed and which are not). This can be useful when writing test code, for example.
datetime. If the time module isn’t enough for your time-tracking needs, it’s quite possible
that datetime will be. It has support for special date and time objects, and allows you to
construct and combine these in various ways. The interface is in many ways a bit more
intuitive than that of the time module.