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Xah's Perl ＆ Python Tutorial

Xah Lee, 2005, …, 2011-01

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 and later. The Perl is v5.8.1 (released 2003-09) and later.

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Language Basics

Basic Syntax

• quoting strings
• Basic String Operations
• 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 in Perl ＆ Python
• complex numbers
• formatting strings

Functions, Objects, Modules

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

Files

• reading and writing to a file
• Traverse a directory

String Pattern Matching (regex) Documentation

Regex

• Perl+Python: Text Pattern Matching (regex) Example
• split a line by regex

Reference resources

Advanced, Specific, Tasks

• Sorting
• Sorting Matrix
• Function with State

Find ＆ Replace

• Perl ＆ Python: Find ＆ Replace Strings in a File
• Python: Find ＆ Replace Strings on Multiple Files
• Python: Find ＆ Replace Multi-line Strings in a Dir
• Python: Find ＆ Replace Mulitple Pairs of Strings
• Python: Find ＆ Replace by Regex Text Pattern
• Python: Find ＆ Replace Strings in Unicode Files
• Perl: Find ＆ Replace on Multiple Files

Unicode

• Python: Converting a File's Encoding
• Python's 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

Perl Books Survey 2002

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

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