The grp module can be used to read information about UNIX groups from the group database (usually /etc/group ). The read-only interface returns tuple-like objects with named attributes for the standard fields of a group record. Read more… This post is part of the Python Module of the Week series for Python 3. See PyMOTW.com for more articles from the series.

As part of preparing for the talk I will be giving with Thierry Carrez at EuroPython 2016 next month, I wanted to put together a list of some of the projects members of the OpenStack community contribute to outside of things we think of as being part of OpenStack itself. I started by brainstorming myself, but I also asked the community to help me out. I limited my query to projects that somehow touched OpenStack, since what I am trying to establish is that OpenStack contributors identify needs we have, and do the work “upstream” in other projects where appropriate.

The pwd module can be used to read user information from the UNIX password database (usually /etc/passwd ). The read-only interface returns tuple-like objects with named attributes for the standard fields of a password record. Read more… This post is part of the Python Module of the Week series for Python 3. See PyMOTW.com for more articles from the series.

The socketserver module is a framework for creating network servers. It defines classes for handling synchronous network requests (the server request handler blocks until the request is completed) over TCP, UDP, UNIX streams, and UNIX datagrams. It also provides mix-in classes for easily converting servers to use a separate thread or process for each request. Read more… This post is part of the Python Module of the Week series for Python 3.

What’s new in 1.11.0? add line_cleanups feature

The video for my talk last week at PyCon 2016 is available on YouTube now. I’ve also included the talk that I wrote (not necessarily exactly what I delivered, but close) below.

The base64, base32, base16, and base85 encodings convert 8 bit bytes to values that fit inside the ASCII range of printable characters, trading more bits to represent the data for compatibility with systems that only support ASCII data, such as SMTP. The base values correspond to the length of the alphabet used in each encoding. There are also URL-safe variations of the original encodings that use slightly different alphabets. Read more…

My book, the Python Standard Library by Example (for Python 2) is the eBook deal of the day during PyCon 2016. Visit the informit.com/deals to order your DRM-free copy (PDF, ePub, and Mobi) for $19.99 today! *Offer ends 11:59 PST June 1, 2016

cgitb is a valuable debugging tool in the standard library. It was originally designed for showing errors and debugging information in web applications and was later updated to include plain-text output as well, but unfortunately was never renamed. This has led to obscurity, and the module is not used as often as it could be. Read more… This post is part of the Python Module of the Week series for Python 3.

The bisect module implements an algorithm for inserting elements into a list while maintaining the list in sorted order. Read more… This post is part of the Python Module of the Week series for Python 3. See PyMOTW.com for more articles from the series.