Xah's Perl and Python Tutorial

Xah Lee, 2005, ..., 2007

This is a tutorial on Perl and Python. The tutorial is concrete, practical, with a lot short example code that runs. It explains things as they function.

The Pyhton code examples given here are tested with version 2.6. The Perl is v5.8.1 (released 2003-09).

Language Basics

Basic Syntax

Reference resources

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

• Bundled help system

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
• Removing Mac Resource Fork

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.

Download this tutorial: xah_perl-python_tutorial.zip.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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