automate the boring stuff with python

1. Working with Files and Directories:
   • Renaming files.
   • Moving and copying files.
   • Deleting files and directories.
   • Searching for files with specific criteria.
2. Automating Repetitive Tasks:
   • Automating keyboard and mouse input with libraries like pyautogui.
   • Automating web interactions using tools like Selenium.
3. Working with Spreadsheets:
   • Reading and writing data to Excel files using libraries like openpyxl.
4. Web Scraping:
   • Extracting data from websites using libraries like BeautifulSoup and requests.
5. Email Automation:
   • Sending and receiving emails with Python using libraries like smtplib and imaplib.
6. Text Processing:
   • Search and replace text in large files.
   • Extracting information from text documents.
7. Automation of Daily Tasks:
   • Scheduling Python scripts to run at specific times using tools like cron on Linux or Task Scheduler on Windows.
8. 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