Introduction

The objective of this chapter is to lay down some of the basic techniques that will be useful through this book. The main idea is to be able to create a good Python environment to run the automation tasks that will follow, and be able to parse text inputs into structured data.

Python has a good amount of tools installed by default, but it also makes it easy to install third-party tools that can simplify common operations when processing texts. In this chapter, we'll see how to import modules from external sources and use them to leverage the full potential of Python.

The ability to structure input data is critical in any automation task. Most of the data that we will process in this book will come from unformatted sources such as web pages or text files. As the old computer adage says, garbage in, garbage out, making the sanitizing of inputs a very important task.