Xah's Perl ＆ Python Tutorial

Xah Lee, 2005, …, 2012

This is a tutorial on Perl ＆ Python. The tutorial is concrete, practical, with a lot short example code that runs. It explains things as they function.

The Python code examples given here are tested with version 2.6 and later. The Perl is v5.8.1 (released 2003-09) and later.

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Language Basics

• Print Version String
• Quoting Strings
• Basic String Operations
• if statement
• for loop
• while loop
• True and False

Lists

• list basics
• keyed list (dictionary, hashmap)
• looping thru a list
• Applying a Function to a List

Misc

• Unicode in Perl ＆ Python
• complex numbers
• formatting strings

Functions, Objects, Modules

• Loading and Using a Module
• defining a function
• classes and objects
• writing a module

Files

• reading and writing to a file
• Traverse a directory

String Pattern Matching (regex) Documentation

Regex

• Perl ＆ Python : Text Pattern Matching (regex) Example
• Perl ＆ Python: Splitting a Line by Regex

Bundled help system ◇ Perl ＆ Python References

Advanced, Specific, Tasks

• Sorting in Python ＆ Perl
• Perl ＆ Python: General Function for Matrix Sorting
• Python: Function with State (closure)
• Python: What's the Difference Between Tuple and List?
• How to Copy a Nested List in Python?
• Python: a Technique to Append String in a Loop
• Python's Reference and Internal Model of Computing Languages

Find ＆ Replace

• Perl ＆ Python: Find ＆ Replace Strings in a File
• Python: Find ＆ Replace Strings on Multiple Files
• Python: Find ＆ Replace Multi-line Strings in a Dir
• Python: Find ＆ Replace Mulitple Pairs of Strings
• Python: Find ＆ Replace by Regex Text Pattern
• Python: Find ＆ Replace Strings in Unicode Files
• Perl: Find ＆ Replace on Multiple Files

Unicode

• Python: Converting a File's Encoding
• Python's unicodedata Module

Web

• sending email
• get a web page content

• A Script to check HTML file size
• Thumbnail Generation

Unix Sys Admin

• gzip files
• system calls
• Split File Fullpath into Parts

Functional Programing Exercises

Lambda in Python 3000

• combinatorics fun
• list comprehension
• combinatorics fun: pairings reduce
• partition by equivalence
• generic partition by equivalence predicate
• generate all possible pairings
• delete duplicate files
• one-liner loop in Functional Style

Python Documentation Problems

Perl Books Survey 2002

About The Author. Thanks to members of comp.lang.perl.misc and comp.lang.python for comments and corrections.

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