Python Magazine

by Alex Martelli

When should you use Regular Expressions (REs) to perform parsing tasks in Python, and when should you prefer something simpler (string operations and methods), or on the other hand something more powerful (specialized and general purpose parsing modules)? When you do pick REs, how best should you use their various methods? This article assumes that you know the basics of REs and gives you context about their best use (and non-use) in Python.

by Eugen Wintersberger

Writing wrappers for existing C libraries in Python's native C API can be a time consuming and error prone job. The ctypes module, shipped with Python since version 2.5, provides simple mechanisms to extend Python code with C functions from shared libraries. This article gives an introduction to ctypes and shows some examples of how to use the module.

by Dan Felts

If you administer or maintain servers and network devices for a living, and you also manage the security of those devices, then you have probably used Nessus or OpenVAS at one time or another to do vulnerability scans and determine your security posture. Let's dive into this world of security testing with Nessus and OpenVAS and take control of the Nessus server from Python.

by Doug Hellmann

Most OOP discussions focus on GUI or domain-specific development areas, completely ignoring the workhorse of computing: command line programs. This article examines CommandLineApp, a base class for creating command line programs as objects, with option and argument validation, help text generation, and more.

by Brian Jones

Welcome to 2008! Brian introduces a few new faces and sketches the year to come.

by Mark Mruss

Iterators, iterables, and generators are features handled so well by Python that people programming in other languages cannot help but drool over them. Fortunately for us, creating iterators, iterables, and generators is a relatively simple task.

by Doug Hellmann

Test Driven Development and Test Automation are all the rage, and Python developers have no shortage of tools for testing their own applications.

by Steve Holden

Intel's co-op marketing dollars have put the "Intel Inside" logo on our television screens daily, and I would imagine that the associated soundbyte would score high on brand identification.