Python

Beautiful Soup Python Library 

• Way to scrape web data based on html documents 

• Library for Python 

• Documentation available at https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/ 

Urllib.request Python Library 

• Can open files that come from a URL request 

• Can save local copy of image from website 

• Filevar = Open(localfilename.jpg, ‘wb’)   (’wb’ is for write bytes) 

• Filevar.write(urllib.request.urlopen(URLstring.jpg).read()) 

• Filevar.close() 

Python Web Frameworks

• FastAPI: a lightweight web framework geared towards the creation of RESTful APIs. Has support for asynchronous tasks (i.e. return a response, then do the heavy calculations in the background). Done correctly, can also automatically generate interactive documentation for all endpoints.

Object-Relational Mappers

• SQLAlchemy: Popular Python object-relational mapping tool, often paired with the Flask microframework (but compatible with any other). Has support for just about every flavor of SQL, including PostgreSQL and its unique data types.

Other Python Libraries/Tools

• Requests: This library should replace the Urllib.request library which is currently listed. Much easier and nicer to work with.
• SMTPlib: can send emails with Python. Use with the email.MIME libraries to create both plaintext and HTML emails.
• Virtualenv: Create isolated virtual Python installations. Useful when the necessary libraries for a project need to be kept separate and pristine from possibly conflicting global versions. Can then easily generate a list of required libraries with pip freeze.