Xah's Perl and Python Tutorial

Xah Lee, 2005, ..., 2007

This is a tutorial on Perl and Python. The Pyhton code examples given here are tested with version 2.4 (released 2004-11). The Perl is v5.8.1 (released 2003-09).

Language Basics

Spend 15 minutes on each item in this basics section, and you will acquire familiarity to program in Python or Perl on your own. This coverage is concrete. It explains things as they function.

Basic Syntax

Reference resources

• quoting strings
• string: join, length, parts
• if statement
• for statement
• while statement

• Bundled help system
• installing Python 2.4 in Mac OS X

What are OOP's Jargons and Complexities?

Lists

• list basics
• keyed list
• looping thru a list
• Applying a Function to a List

Misc

• Unicode string processing
• complex numbers
• formatting strings

Functions, Objects, Modules

• defining a function
• classes and objects
• writing a module
• Loading and Using a Module

Files

• reading and writing to a file
• Traverse a directory

String Pattern Matching (regex) Documentation

Regex

• Text pattern matching (regex)
• split a line by regex

Advanced and Specific, Issues and Examples

• Sorting
• sorting a matrix
• function with states

Find & Replace string in files

Python

• find replace strings in a file
• find replace strings in dir
• find replace strings that span multiple lines
• find replace multiple pairs of strings
• find replace by regex text pattern
• find replace strings in unicode files

Perl

For a full-featured script that does find-replace in Perl, see: Find & Replace on Multiple Files with Perl

Strings and Text Processing

• convert character set's encoding
• Unicode study with unicodedata module

Web

What is Expresiveness in a Computer Language

• sending email
• get a web page content

• A Script to check HTML file size
• Thumbnail Generation

Unix Sys Admin

• gzip files
• system calls
• Split File Fullpath into Parts

Functional Programing Exercises

Lambda in Python 3000

• combinatorics fun
• list comprehension
• combinatorics fun: pairings reduce
• partition by equivalence
• generic partition by equivalence predicate
• generate all possible pairings
• delete duplicate files
• one-liner loop in Functional Style

Python Documentation Problems

About The Author. Thanks to members of comp.lang.perl.misc and comp.lang.python for comments and corrections.

Page created: 2005-01.
© 2005 by Xah Lee.