today is an operation being performed on date, with its results now saved in the variable today. Python is particular about syntax here, too. Our next statement sets up a new variable, today, with the collected information of date.today(). Later we'll see how this applies to Scribus. The basic Python interpreter would not know about the command without this statement. In this particular case, datetime refers to the Python module of that name, and date refers to a particular function in that module. from and import are Python commands datetime and date are variable names.

Also, variable names do not begin with a special character.

All I needed to do was to run dos2unix on the file.Īs we get to executable lines, note that in Python, these don't end in a semicolon-they just end. Eventually I figured out the encoding of the file was (as in Windows) with carriage returns at the ends of lines, in spite of this line being in the script. When I was trying to run this, I kept getting an error that it couldn't find /usr/bin/env python^M. The next isn't absolutely necessary because UTF-8 is the default character encoding on most Linux systems, but it does highlight an issue I first had when I modified this script from one I copied from a Windows machine. This is a simple script called date.py: #!/usr/bin/env pythonĪt the top we have our she-bang line ( #, as with Perl), but here is a bit different style, using /usr/bin/env to find the current system Python interpreter. Let's start with a basic utility that we might envision using in a DTP setting later on. If you can't make a basic algorithm work in some way outside of Scribus, it's certainly not going to work inside it. As I advocated in my article about getting started with Perl, I began by looking at the various scripts included with Python, went back and forth with various references, and made various scripts for use outside of Scribus. Included with Scribus is a plugin called Scripter, which allows the use of a number of internal Python commands to perform a variety of analytical, creative, and editing operations in Scribus, as well as using all the other functionality that Python provides. eBook: An introduction to programming with Bash.Try for free: Red Hat Learning Subscription.

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