We have already seen in the previous chapter how to access a network device using different methods and protocols, then execute commands on the remote device to get an output back to Python. Now, it's time to extract some useful data from this output.
In this chapter, you'll learn how to use different tools and libraries in Python to extract useful data from returned output and act on it using regular expressions. Also, we will use a special library called CiscoConfParse to audit the configuration, then we will learn how to visualize data to generate visually appealing graphs and reports using the matplotlib library.
We will cover the following topics in this chapter:
- Understanding parsers
- Introduction to regular expressions
- Configuration auditing using Ciscoconfparse
- Visualizing returned data with matplotlib
