- Working with Files and Directories:
- Renaming files.
- Moving and copying files.
- Deleting files and directories.
- Searching for files with specific criteria.
- Automating Repetitive Tasks:
- Automating keyboard and mouse input with libraries like
pyautogui
. - Automating web interactions using tools like Selenium.
- Automating keyboard and mouse input with libraries like
- Working with Spreadsheets:
- Reading and writing data to Excel files using libraries like
openpyxl
.
- Reading and writing data to Excel files using libraries like
- Web Scraping:
- Extracting data from websites using libraries like
BeautifulSoup
andrequests
.
- Extracting data from websites using libraries like
- Email Automation:
- Sending and receiving emails with Python using libraries like
smtplib
andimaplib
.
- Sending and receiving emails with Python using libraries like
- Text Processing:
- Search and replace text in large files.
- Extracting information from text documents.
- Automation of Daily Tasks:
- Scheduling Python scripts to run at specific times using tools like
cron
on Linux or Task Scheduler on Windows.
- Scheduling Python scripts to run at specific times using tools like
- Data Analysis and Reporting:
- Analyzing data from various sources and generating reports.
Here’s a simple example of automating a repetitive task using Python to rename a batch of files in a directory:
pythonCopy codeimport os
# Set the directory path where your files are located
directory = "/path/to/files"
# Iterate through files in the directory
for filename in os.listdir(directory):
if filename.endswith(".txt"): # You can specify the file extension you want to rename
# Define the new name for the file
new_name = filename.replace("old_text", "new_text")
# Construct the full path for the file
old_path = os.path.join(directory, filename)
new_path = os.path.join(directory, new_name)
# Rename the file
os.rename(old_path, new_path)
This script renames all .txt
files in the specified directory by replacing occurrences of “old_text” with “new_text” in their filenames.
The book “Automate the Boring Stuff with Python” provides more in-depth examples and explanations for each topic, along with exercises to practice your skills. You can find the book online or purchase a copy to learn more about automating tasks with Python