Practical Business Python

Taking care of business, one python script at a time

Mon 27 November 2017

Using Python’s Pathlib Module

Posted by Chris Moffitt in articles   

It is difficult to write a python script that does not have some interaction with the file system. The activity could be as simple as reading a data file into a pandas DataFrame or as complex as parsing thousands of files in a deeply nested directory structure. Python’s standard library has several helpful functions for these tasks - including the pathlib module.

The pathlib module was first included in python 3.4 and has been enhanced in each of the subsequent releases. Pathlib is an object oriented interface to the filesystem and provides a more intuitive method to interact with the filesystem in a platform agnostic and pythonic manner.

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Tue 06 January 2015

Web Scraping - It’s Your Civic Duty

Posted by Chris Moffitt in articles   

More and more information from local, state and federal governments is being placed on the web. However, a lot of the data is not presented in a way that is easy to download and manipulate. I think it is an important civic duty for us all to be aware of how government money is spent. Having the data in a more accessible format is a first step in that process.

In this article, I’ll use BeautifulSoup to scrape some data from the Minnesota 2014 Capital Budget. Then I’ll load the data into a pandas DataFrame and create a simple plot showing where the money is going.

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