library-tour.txt

A Brief Scan of the Python Standard Library
===========================================

Here are some modules that I thought might be useful to know about.

optparse
--------

Command line options parsing so that your scripts can take options, print
help for the options, and otherwise behave like a nicely put together script.

First, import the module and create a parser object:

>>> from optparse import OptionParser

>>> parser = OptionParser()

Now, add some options.  The first option here says to take a filename as
an option after either -f or --file; the second option toggles the
'verbose' attribute on the option parser to be True.

>>> _ = parser.add_option("-f", "--file", dest="filename",
...                  help="write report to FILE", metavar="FILE")
>>> _ = parser.add_option("-q", "--quiet",
...                  action="store_false", dest="verbose", default=True,
...                  help="don't print status messages to stdout")

Now you can parse a dummy command line and retrieve the options as well
as any following arguments:

>>> test_cmdline = "dummy --quiet -f testfile arg1 arg2 arg3".split()[1:]

>>> (options, args) = parser.parse_args(test_cmdline)
>>> print options
{'verbose': False, 'filename': 'testfile'}
>>> print args
['arg1', 'arg2', 'arg3']

There's also a convenient help message printout:

>>> try:
...    parser.parse_args(["-h"])
... except SystemExit:
...    pass
Usage: run-doctests.py [options]
<BLANKLINE>
Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -f FILE, --file=FILE  write report to FILE
  -q, --quiet           don't print status messages to stdout




StringIO
--------

difflib
-------

pprint
------

weakref
-------

itertools and functools
-----------------------

csv
---

ConfigParser
------------

os.path
-------

tempfile
--------

gzip
----

urllib
------