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Python Essentials

You're reading from   Python Essentials Modernize existing Python code and plan code migrations to Python using this definitive guide

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jun 2015
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781784390341
Length 298 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Steven F. Lott Steven F. Lott
Author Profile Icon Steven F. Lott
Steven F. Lott
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Toc

Table of Contents (17) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Getting Started FREE CHAPTER 2. Simple Data Types 3. Expressions and Output 4. Variables, Assignment and Scoping Rules 5. Logic, Comparisons, and Conditions 6. More Complex Data Types 7. Basic Function Definitions 8. More Advanced Functions 9. Exceptions 10. Files, Databases, Networks, and Contexts 11. Class Definitions 12. Scripts, Modules, Packages, Libraries, and Applications 13. Metaprogramming and Decorators 14. Fit and Finish – Unit Testing, Packaging, and Documentation 15. Next Steps Index

Creating a package

A package is a directory that contains module files plus one additional file. Each package must have an __init__.py file. This file must be present and is often empty.

The poem, Zen of Python, by Tim Peters, offers the following advice:

Flat is better than nested.

The idea is to organize Python applications into a flat collection of modules to the greatest extent possible. A deeply-nested, complex hierarchy of packages isn't considered helpful.

We can use a package in two ways. We can import a module that's part of a package. The standard library, for example, has an XML package with several XML parser modules. We can use import xml.etree to import the etree module from the XML package. In this case, the __init__.py file has a comment and a list of sub-packages.

In other cases, we can import the package, as a whole, as if the package were a module. When we write import collections, for example, we're really importing the module collections/__init__.py.

The __init__...

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