Internet Data Handling with Python

Internet Data Handling

Data handling and organizing are everything when making necessary business decisions in the ever-growing business world. A business can become as successful as it efficiently collects and organizes valuable data. The competence of a business relies significantly on how it works with collecting, processing, verifying, organizing, and utilizing crucial information.

Benefits of Data Handling

Although there are numerous benefits of data handling. However, some of the significant benefits a business can obtain through efficient data handling are the following:

Increase in productivity
Saving valuable resources
Increasing operational nimbleness
Reducing security risks
Reducing data loss
Improving decision making

Data Handling using Python

Various Python modules support numerous data handling formats standard on the internet. These modules support the encoding and decoding of the data handling formats that internet applications commonly use. Commonly used basic modules to process data formats and encoding are:

base64
HTML
JSON
XML

Therefore, many Python modules are famous for supporting data handling, encoding, and decoding. A brief description of some of these famous modules is following:

1. sgmllib

The sgmllib module is the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) parser subset. It defines a class SGMLParser which helps in parsing text files formatted in SGML. The module serves as the basis for the htmllib module.

2. htmllib

This module provides a parser for the text files in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) format. The htmllib module serves a class with no direct connections with the I/O but calls to a formatter object’s methods to obtain an output. The HTMLParser class serves as a basis for other classes and extends the SGMLParser class.

3. xmllib

This module represents a parser for the text files in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format. The xmllib module defines a class XMLParser which is the basis for parsing XML documents.

4. rfc822

This module helps in parsing the mail headers defined by the internet standard RFC822. The rfc822 module defines the class Message, which helps in representing RFC822 email header collections and reads these file headers. There is also a helper class AddressList in order to parse RFC822 addresses.

5. mimetools

This module provides the tools for manipulating and parsing Multipurpose Internet mail extensions (MIME) multipart and encoded messages. The mimetools module defines a subclass of rfc822. Message class and provides numerous utility functions.

6. formatter

This module is helpful for generic output formatting by a class HTMLParser from the module htmllib. The formatter supports two interface definitions with multiple implementations. Therefore, the formatter interface is helpful for the HTMLParser, while the writer interface is the requirement of the formatter interface.

7. mailcap

This module helps read the mailcap files for the configuration of MIME-aware applications’ reaction to files having different MIME types. The MIME-aware applications include mail readers and Web browsers. The mailcap format is RFC1524, and most Unix systems support these files.

8. base64

This module performs base64 encoding and decoding for arbitrary binary strings into text strings. The base64 module helps encode binary data in mail attachments. This encoding scheme is defined in RFC1421 and is helpful for MIME email and various internet applications. Moreover, there are various other modules such as binhex, uu, xdrlib, mailbox, mimify, and many others.

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