This chapter covers commonly used and advanced Python techniques for storing information between program executions—DBM files, object pickling, object shelves, and Python’s SQL database API—and briefly introduces full-blown OODBs such as ZODB, as well as ORMs such as SQLObject and SQLAlchemy. The Python standard library’s SQLite support is used for the SQL examples, but the API is portable to enterprise-level systems such as MySQL.

This chapter explores techniques for implementing more advanced data structures in Python—stacks, sets, binary search trees, graphs, and the like. In Python, these take the form of object implementations.

This chapter addresses Python tools and techniques for parsing text-based information—string splits and joins, regular expression matching, XML parsing, recursive descent parsing, and more advanced language-based topics.

This chapter introduces integration techniques—both extending Python with compiled libraries and embedding Python code in other applications. While the main focus here is on linking Python with compiled C code, we’ll also investigate integration with Java, .NET, and more. This chapter assumes that you know how to read C programs, and it is intended mostly for developers responsible for implementing application integration layers.