Utilities and Tools

CLI Development

My recommended CLI development tools:

Click

Why I recommend it:

• Beautiful command line interfaces
• Intuitive and composable API
• Extensive documentation
• From the creators of Flask
• Great for both simple and complex CLIs

Key Features:

• 🌈 Colorful output support
• 📝 Automatic help page generation
• 🔗 Command nesting
• 🔍 Argument validation
• 🔧 Easy configuration

Quick Example:

import click

@click.command()
@click.option('--count', default=1, help='Number of greetings.')
@click.option('--name', prompt='Your name', help='The person to greet.')
def hello(count, name):
    """Simple program that greets NAME for a total of COUNT times."""
    for x in range(count):
        click.echo(f'Hello {name}!')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    hello()

Rich

Why I recommend it:

• Beautiful terminal formatting
• Extensive styling capabilities
• Great for data presentation
• Makes CLI apps look professional
• Easy to use yet powerful

Key Features:

• 🌈 24-bit color and styles
• 📈 Tables and progress bars
• 💻 Syntax highlighting
• 🎬 Live displays
• 📊 Markdown/markup rendering

Quick Example:

from rich import print
from rich.table import Table

table = Table(title="My Tools")
table.add_column("Name", style="cyan")
table.add_column("Version", style="magenta")
table.add_row("Python", "3.12.0")
table.add_row("Rich", "13.7.0")
print(table)

TQDM

Why I recommend it:

• Smart progress bars
• Works with iterables
• Minimal code changes needed
• Great for long-running operations

Key Features:

• 📊 Progress monitoring
• ⏱️ ETA calculation
• 📈 Automatic update rate
• 🔄 Nested progress bars

Quick Example:

from tqdm import tqdm
import time

for i in tqdm(range(100)):
    time.sleep(0.1)  # Simulate work

HTTP Clients

My recommended HTTP clients:

Requests

Why I recommend it:

• Elegant and simple HTTP library
• Industry standard for HTTP in Python
• Human-friendly API
• Extensive features

Key Features:

• 🌈 Beautiful API design
• 🔒 SSL/TLS verification
• 🌎 Session support
• 💪 Strong authentication

Quick Example:

import requests

# Simple GET request
response = requests.get('https://api.github.com')
data = response.json()

# POST with authentication
response = requests.post(
    'https://api.example.com/data',
    json={'key': 'value'},
    headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer token'}
)

Web Scraping

My recommended web scraping tools:

BeautifulSoup

Why I recommend it:

• Easy HTML/XML parsing
• Forgiving parser
• Intuitive API
• Great documentation

Key Features:

• 🔍 Easy navigation
• 🛠️ Multiple parsers
• 🔧 Search by tags/attributes
• 📚 HTML cleanup

Quick Example:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

# Parse HTML
html = requests.get('https://example.com').text
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')

# Find elements
title = soup.find('h1').text
links = [a['href'] for a in soup.find_all('a')]

Scrapy

Why I recommend it:

• Production-grade web scraping
• Asynchronous architecture
• Built-in pipeline system
• Extensive middleware support

Key Features:

• 🚀 High performance
• 🔄 Concurrent requests
• 🛠️ Built-in extensions
• 💾 Data export

Quick Example:

import scrapy

class BookSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'bookspider'
    start_urls = ['http://books.example.com']

    def parse(self, response):
        for book in response.css('.book-item'):
            yield {
                'title': book.css('.title::text').get(),
                'price': book.css('.price::text').get()
            }