Unit 3

Modules

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

module
 A module is a file containing Python definitions and
statements intended for use in other Python programs.

Random numbers

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 The time module
 The time module has a function called clock.
 Whenever clock is called, it returns a floating point number
representing how many seconds have elapsed since your
program started running.
 So our function runs about 57% slower than the built-in one.
Generating and summing up ten million elements

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT
Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT
Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT
 The math module
 The math module contains the kinds of mathematical functions.
 Mathematical functions are “pure” functions

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 Creating your own modules
 All we need to do to create our own modules is to save our script as a
file with a .py extension.

Save as Hello.py

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Namespaces
 A namespace is a collection of identifiers that belong to a module, or
to a function,

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Namespaces

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Namespaces
Functions also have their own namespaces:

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Scope and lookup rules
The scope of an identifier is the region of program code in
which the identifier can be accessed, or used.
There are three important scopes in Python:
• Local scope refers to identifiers declared within a function.
•Global scope refers to all the identifiers declared within the
current module, or file.
•Built-in scope refers to all the identifiers built into
Python—those like range and min

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Scope and lookup rules

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Attributes and the dot operator
Variables defined inside a module are called attributes of the
module
Attributes are accessed using the dot operator (.)
Modules contain functions as well as attributes, and the dot
operator is used to access them in the same way.

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 Files

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 Files
 While a program is running, its data is stored in random access
memory (RAM).
 RAM is fast and inexpensive, but it is also volatile, which means
that when the program ends, or the computer shuts down, data
in RAM disappears.
 To make data available the next time the computer is turned on
and the program is started, it has to be written to a non-volatile
storage medium, such a hard drive, usb drive, or CD-RW.
 Data on non-volatile storage media is stored in named locations
on the media called files

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 Files
 Working with files is a lot like working with a notebook.
 To use a notebook, it has to be opened.
 When done, it has to be closed.
 While the notebook is open, it can either be read from or
written to.
 In either case, the notebook holder knows where they are.

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 Writing our first file

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 Writing our first file
 Opening a file creates what we call a file handle.
 In this example, the variable myfile refers to the new handle
object.
 The open function takes two arguments.
 The first is the name of the file, and the
 second is the mode.

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 Reading a file line-at-a-time

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 Turning a file into a list of lines
 It is often useful to fetch data from a disk file and turn it into a list
of lines.
 Suppose we have a file containing our friends and their email
addresses, one per line in the file.
 But we’d like the lines sorted into alphabetical order.
 A good plan is to read everything into a list of lines, then sort the
list, and then write the sorted list back to another file:

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 Turning a file into a list of lines

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 Reading the whole file at once
 Another way of working with text files is to read the complete
contents of the file into a string, and then to use our string-
processing skills to work with the contents.

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 Reading the whole file at once

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Your file paths may need to be explicitly
named.
 In the above example, we’re assuming that the file somefile.txt is
in the same directory as your Python source code.
 If this is not the case, you may need to provide a full or a relative
path to the file.

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Your file paths may need to be explicitly
named.

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Your file paths may need to be explicitly
named.

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 Working with binary files
 Files that hold photographs, videos, zip files, executable
programs, etc. are called binary files.
 They’re not organized into lines, and cannot be opened with a
normal text editor.
 Python works just as easily with binary files, but when we read
from the file we’re going to get bytes back rather than a string.
Here we’ll copy one binary file to another:

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Working with binary files

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Working with binary files

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 Directories
 Files on non-volatile storage media are organized by a set of rules
known as a file system.
 File systems are made up of files and directories, which are
containers for both files and other directories.
 When we create a new file by opening it and writing, the new file
goes in the current directory
 Similarly, when we open a file for reading , Python looks for it in
the current directory.
 If we want to open a file somewhere else, we have to specify the
path to the file, which is the name of the directory (or folder)
where the file is located:
Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT
 Directories

A Windows path might be

"c:/temp/words.txt" or "c:\\temp\\words.txt".

Because backslashes are used to escape things like newlines and tabs, we need to
write two backslashes in a literal string to get one!

We cannot use / or \ as part of a filename; they are reserved as a delimiter between

directory and filenames.
Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT
What about fetching something from the
web?

The urlretrieve function—just one call—could be used to download

any kind of content from the Internet.

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT
Different example.

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Different example.
 Opening the remote url returns what we call a socket.
 This is a handle to our end of the connection between our
program and the remote web server.
 We can call read, write, and close methods on the socket object
in much the same way as we can work with a file handle.

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

 Algorithms
 Linear search
 Binary search
 merging two sorted lists.

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Binary Search

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Binary Search Contd….

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT

Merging two sorted lists.

Akshata S Bhayyar, Asst. Prof. Dept. of CSE, RIT