This chapter will allow us to get familiar with various object-oriented concepts in Python. We will see that Python can not only be used as a scripting language, but that it also supports a wide range of object-oriented principles and can therefore be used to design reusable and scalable software components. As well as this, we will explore regular expressions, files, and other I/O-based access including JSON, CSV, and XML. Finally, we will discuss exception handling. We will be covering the following topics in this chapter:

• Object-oriented programming in Python
• Files, directories, and other types of I/O-based access
• Regular expressions in Python
• Data manipulation and parsing with XML, JSON, and CSV data
• Exception handling