Text Processing in Python

Chapter 1. Python Basics

This chapter discusses Python capabilities that are likely to be used in text processing applications. For an introduction to Python syntax and semantics per se, readers might want to skip ahead to Appendix A (A Selective and Impressionistic Short Review of Python); Guido van Rossum's Python Tutorial at <http://python.org/doc/current/tut/tut.html> is also quite excellent. The focus here occupies a somewhat higher level: not the Python language narrowly, but also not yet specific to text processing.

In Section 1.1, I look at some programming techniques that flow out of the Python language itself, but that are usually not obvious to Python beginners—and are sometimes not obvious even to intermediate Python programmers. ...