Modules and the Standard Library

What you will learn

• Imports and modules
• Packages and sys.path
• platform, os and pathlib
• collections
• datetime
• Regular expressions
• math and statistics
• functools

Lessons

1. 1

   Imports and Modules

   Pull in code with import, from and as, avoid star imports, ask the platform module what you are running on, see what a module really is, guard scripts with __name__, and dodge the shadowing trap.

   17 exercises

2. 2

   Packages and the Import System

   Group modules into packages, import between them, mark what is public, see where Python looks for modules and how it caches them, and use os, sys and pathlib for environment and paths.

   14 exercises

3. 3

   collections

   Count with Counter, group with defaultdict, name your tuples with namedtuple and keep a rolling window or a queue with deque.

   14 exercises

4. 4

   Dates and Times

   Build dates, do real date arithmetic with timedelta, format and parse with strftime and strptime, and store moments in UTC with aware datetimes.

   13 exercises

5. 5

   Regular Expressions

   Find, validate, extract and rewrite text with re: search versus match versus fullmatch, classes and anchors, greedy quantifiers, groups and re.sub.

   14 exercises

6. 6

   math, random, statistics and functools

   Round, truncate and compare floats properly with math, make randomness reproducible, summarize numbers with statistics, and reach for functools and operator instead of writing helpers by hand.

   12 exercises

7. 7

   Putting It Together

   Combine re, collections, datetime and calendar into realistic tools: a log report, a subscription renewal calculator, a word ladder solver and a weekly event scheduler.

   7 exercises

How you practice

You practice in the browser and every exercise gives you feedback right away. This course uses these formats:

• Code exercise: 35
• Predict the output: 19
• Fix the bug: 15
• Fill in the blank: 8
• Type the answer: 5
• Match the pairs: 4
• Multiple choice: 2
• Spot the bug: 1
• Select all that apply: 1
• Reorder lines: 1

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