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Let's Begin Our Automation Journey

The objective of this chapter is to lay down some of the basic techniques that will be useful throughout the whole book. The main idea is to create a good Python environment to run the automation tasks that follow and be able to parse text inputs into structured data.

Python has a good number of tools installed by default, but it also makes it easy to install third-party tools that can simplify many common operations. We'll see how to import modules from external sources and use them to leverage the full potential of Python.

We will install and use tools to help process texts. The ability to structure input data is critical in any automation task. Most of the data that we will process in this book will come from unformatted sources such as web pages or text files. As the old computer adage says, garbage in, garbage out, making the sanitizing of inputs a very important task.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following recipes:

• Activating a virtual environment
• Installing third-party packages
• Creating strings with formatted values
• Manipulating strings
• Extracting data from structured strings
• Using a third-party tool—parse
• Introducing regular expressions
• Going deeper into regular expressions
• Adding command-line arguments

We will start by creating our own self-contained environment to work in.