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Python for Secret Agents

You're reading from   Python for Secret Agents Analyze, encrypt, and uncover intelligence data using Python, the essential tool for all aspiring secret agents

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Product type Paperback
Published in Aug 2014
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781783980420
Length 216 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Steven F. Lott Steven F. Lott
Author Profile Icon Steven F. Lott
Steven F. Lott
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Toc

Background briefing – handling file formats


As we've observed so far, our data comes in a wide variety of physical formats. In Chapter 1, Our Espionage Toolkit, we looked at ZIP files, which are archives that contain other files. In Chapter 2, Acquiring Intelligence Data, we looked at JSON files, which serialize many kinds of Python objects.

In this chapter, we're going to review some previous technology and then look at working specifically with CSV files. The important part is to look at the various kinds of image files that we might need to work with.

In all cases, Python encourages looking at a file as a kind of context. This means that we should strive to open files using the with statement so that we can be sure the file is properly closed when we're done with the processing. This doesn't always work out perfectly, so there are some exceptions.

Working with the OS filesystem

There are many modules for working with files. We'll focus on two: glob and os.

glob

The glob module implements filesystem...

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