PDF files aren't pleasant.

The good news is that they're documented (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html).

They bad news is that they're rather complex.

I found four Python packages for reading PDF files.

• http://pybrary.net/pyPdf/ - weak
• http://www.swftools.org/gfx_tutorial.html - depends on binary …

The advantage of multiprocessing is to have multiple processes working on a problem. If we break a big problem into small, concurrent steps, we can often get results in less elapsed time by making more effective use of the CPU. Specifically, we want to make use of non-user time where …

See Apache Log Parsing for the background.

Here's a generator function which expands a simple Access to be a more detailed named tuple.

Access_Details= namedtuple( 'Access_Details',
    ['access', 'time', 'method', 'url', 'protocol'] )

def details_iter( iterable ):
    def parse_time_linux( ts ):
        return datetime.datetime.strptime( ts, "%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %z" )

    def …

How much do I love Python? Consider this little snippet that parses Apache logs.

import re
from collections import defaultdict, named tuple

format_pat= re.compile(
   r"(?P<host>[\d\.]+)\s"
   r"(?P<identity>\S*)\s"
   r"(?P<user>\S*)\s"
   r"\[(?P<time>.*?)\]\s"
   r'"(?P<request>.*?)"\s'
   r"(?P …

I've revised (and streamlined) my Building Skills in Programming book. The 2.6.2. edition will simply replace the 2.6.1. edition, leading to the possibility of broken bookmarks because of the changes.

Currently, the non-programmer book accounts for under 10% hits on the http://www.itmaybeaback.com/book …

The csv module in Python 2.7 is more-or-less hard-wired to work with ASCII and only ASCII.

Sadly, we're often confronted with CSV files that include Unicode characters. There are numerous Stack Overflow questions on this topic. http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=python+csv+unicode

What to do? Since csv …

Read this: Shared Counter with Python Multiprocessing.

Brilliant. Thank you for this.

Too many of the questions on StackOverflow that include multi-threading are better approached as multi-processing. In Linux, there are times when all threads of a single process are stopped while the process (as a whole) waits for system …

A common (and small) task is reformatting a file that's in some variant of CSV. It could be a SQL database extract, or an export from an application that works well with CSV files.

In Python 2.x, a CSV file with Unicode was a bit of a problem. The …

Some folks love the twin ideas that (1) "someone" might break the API rules and (2) they must write lots of bonus code to "prevent" problems.

Sigh.

There are three distinct things here.

• API definition - something we do all the time.
• "Defensive Programming" - something that may or may not actually …

Read this: "Here Comes Functional Programming" by Larry O'Brien in SD Times.

people who should know better continue to assert that statically typed languages are "safer, because the compiler can catch errors that otherwise wouldn't show up until runtime." While it's true a statically typed language can detect that you've …