Web scraping has been used to extract data from websites almost from the time the World Wide Web was born. In the early days, scraping was mainly done on static pages – those with known elements, tags ...

Python, for all its power and popularity, has long lacked a form of flow control found in other languages—a way to take a value and match it elegantly against one of a number of possible conditions.

Previously, I erroneously titled my column as "SIGALRM Timers and Stdin Analysis". It turned out that by the time I'd finished writing it, I had spent a lot of time talking about SIGALRM and how to ...