Python documentation

Introduction
Built-in Functions
Non-essential Built-in Functions
Built-in Constants
- Constants added by the site module
Built-in Objects
Built-in Types
- Truth Value Testing
- Boolean Operations — and, or, not
- Comparisons
- Numeric Types — int, float, long, complex
- Iterator Types
- Sequence Types — str, unicode, list, tuple, buffer, xrange
- Set Types — set, frozenset
- Mapping Types — dict
- File Objects
- Context Manager Types
- Other Built-in Types
- Special Attributes
Built-in Exceptions
String Services
- string — Common string operations
- re — Regular expression operations
- struct — Interpret strings as packed binary data
- difflib — Helpers for computing deltas
- StringIO — Read and write strings as files
- cStringIO — Faster version of StringIO
- textwrap — Text wrapping and filling
- codecs — Codec registry and base classes
- unicodedata — Unicode Database
- stringprep — Internet String Preparation
- fpformat — Floating point conversions
Data Types
- datetime — Basic date and time types
- calendar — General calendar-related functions
- collections — High-performance container datatypes
- heapq — Heap queue algorithm
- bisect — Array bisection algorithm
- array — Efficient arrays of numeric values
- sets — Unordered collections of unique elements
- sched — Event scheduler
- mutex — Mutual exclusion support
- queue — A synchronized queue class
- weakref — Weak references
- UserDict — Class wrapper for dictionary objects
- UserList — Class wrapper for list objects
- UserString — Class wrapper for string objects
- types — Names for built-in types
- new — Creation of runtime internal objects
- copy — Shallow and deep copy operations
- pprint — Data pretty printer
- repr — Alternate repr implementation
Numeric and Mathematical Modules
- numbers — Numeric abstract base classes
- math — Mathematical functions
- cmath — Mathematical functions for complex numbers
- decimal — Decimal fixed point and floating point arithmetic
- fractions — Rational numbers
- random — Generate pseudo-random numbers
- itertools — Functions creating iterators for efficient looping
- functools — Higher order functions and operations on callable objects
- operator — Standard operators as functions
File and Directory Access
- os.path — Common pathname manipulations
- fileinput — Iterate over lines from multiple input streams
- stat — Interpreting stat results
- statvfs — Constants used with os.statvfs
- filecmp — File and Directory Comparisons
- tempfile — Generate temporary files and directories
- glob — Unix style pathname pattern expansion
- fnmatch — Unix filename pattern matching
- linecache — Random access to text lines
- shutil — High-level file operations
- dircache — Cached directory listings
- macpath — Mac OS 9 path manipulation functions
Data Persistence
- pickle — Python object serialization
- cPickle — A faster pickle
- copy_reg — Register pickle support functions
- shelve — Python object persistence
- marshal — Internal Python object serialization
- anydbm — Generic access to DBM-style databases
- whichdb — Guess which DBM module created a database
- dbm — Simple “database” interface
- gdbm — GNU’s reinterpretation of dbm
- dbhash — DBM-style interface to the BSD database library
- bsddb — Interface to Berkeley DB library
- dumbdbm — Portable DBM implementation
- sqlite3 — DB-API 2.0 interface for SQLite databases
Data Compression and Archiving
- zlib — Compression compatible with gzip
- gzip — Support for gzip files
- bz2 — Compression compatible with bzip2
- zipfile — Work with ZIP archives
- tarfile — Read and write tar archive files
File Formats
- csv — CSV File Reading and Writing
- ConfigParser — Configuration file parser
- robotparser — Parser for robots.txt
- netrc — netrc file processing
- xdrlib — Encode and decode XDR data
- plistlib — Generate and parse Mac OS X .plist files
Cryptographic Services
- hashlib — Secure hashes and message digests
- hmac — Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication
- md5 — MD5 message digest algorithm
- sha — SHA-1 message digest algorithm
Generic Operating System Services
- os — Miscellaneous operating system interfaces
- io — Core tools for working with streams
- time — Time access and conversions
- optparse — More powerful command line option parser
- getopt — Parser for command line options
- logging — Logging facility for Python
- getpass — Portable password input
- curses — Terminal handling for character-cell displays
- curses.textpad — Text input widget for curses programs
- curses.wrapper — Terminal handler for curses programs
- curses.ascii — Utilities for ASCII characters
- curses.panel — A panel stack extension for curses.
- platform — Access to underlying platform’s identifying data.
- errno — Standard errno system symbols
- ctypes — A foreign function library for Python.
Optional Operating System Services
- select — Waiting for I/O completion
- threading — Higher-level threading interface
- thread — Multiple threads of control
- dummy_threading — Drop-in replacement for the threading module
- dummy_thread — Drop-in replacement for the thread module
- multiprocessing — Process-based “threading” interface
- mmap — Memory-mapped file support
- readline — GNU readline interface
- rlcompleter — Completion function for GNU readline
Interprocess Communication and Networking
- subprocess — Subprocess management
- socket — Low-level networking interface
- ssl — SSL wrapper for socket objects
- signal — Set handlers for asynchronous events
- popen2 — Subprocesses with accessible I/O streams
- asyncore — Asynchronous socket handler
- asynchat — Asynchronous socket command/response handler
Internet Data Handling
- email — An email and MIME handling package
- json — JSON encoder and decoder
- mailcap — Mailcap file handling
- mailbox — Manipulate mailboxes in various formats
- mhlib — Access to MH mailboxes
- mimetools — Tools for parsing MIME messages
- mimetypes — Map filenames to MIME types
- MimeWriter — Generic MIME file writer
- mimify — MIME processing of mail messages
- multifile — Support for files containing distinct parts
- rfc822 — Parse RFC 2822 mail headers
- base64 — RFC 3548: Base16, Base32, Base64 Data Encodings
- binhex — Encode and decode binhex4 files
- binascii — Convert between binary and ASCII
- quopri — Encode and decode MIME quoted-printable data
- uu — Encode and decode uuencode files
Structured Markup Processing Tools
- HTMLParser — Simple HTML and XHTML parser
- sgmllib — Simple SGML parser
- htmllib — A parser for HTML documents
- htmlentitydefs — Definitions of HTML general entities
- xml.parsers.expat — Fast XML parsing using Expat
- xml.dom — The Document Object Model API
- xml.dom.minidom — Lightweight DOM implementation
- xml.dom.pulldom — Support for building partial DOM trees
- xml.sax — Support for SAX2 parsers
- xml.sax.handler — Base classes for SAX handlers
- xml.sax.saxutils — SAX Utilities
- xml.sax.xmlreader — Interface for XML parsers
- xml.etree.ElementTree — The ElementTree XML API
Internet Protocols and Support
- webbrowser — Convenient Web-browser controller
- cgi — Common Gateway Interface support.
- cgitb — Traceback manager for CGI scripts
- wsgiref — WSGI Utilities and Reference Implementation
- urllib — Open arbitrary resources by URL
- urllib2 — extensible library for opening URLs
- httplib — HTTP protocol client
- ftplib — FTP protocol client
- poplib — POP3 protocol client
- imaplib — IMAP4 protocol client
- nntplib — NNTP protocol client
- smtplib — SMTP protocol client
- smtpd — SMTP Server
- telnetlib — Telnet client
- uuid — UUID objects according to RFC 4122
- urlparse — Parse URLs into components
- SocketServer — A framework for network servers
- BaseHTTPServer — Basic HTTP server
- SimpleHTTPServer — Simple HTTP request handler
- CGIHTTPServer — CGI-capable HTTP request handler
- cookielib — Cookie handling for HTTP clients
- Cookie — HTTP state management
- xmlrpclib — XML-RPC client access
- SimpleXMLRPCServer — Basic XML-RPC server
- DocXMLRPCServer — Self-documenting XML-RPC server
Multimedia Services
- audioop — Manipulate raw audio data
- imageop — Manipulate raw image data
- aifc — Read and write AIFF and AIFC files
- sunau — Read and write Sun AU files
- wave — Read and write WAV files
- chunk — Read IFF chunked data
- colorsys — Conversions between color systems
- imghdr — Determine the type of an image
- sndhdr — Determine type of sound file
- ossaudiodev — Access to OSS-compatible audio devices
Internationalization
- gettext — Multilingual internationalization services
- locale — Internationalization services
Program Frameworks
- cmd — Support for line-oriented command interpreters
- shlex — Simple lexical analysis
Graphical User Interfaces with Tk
- Tkinter — Python interface to Tcl/Tk
- Tix — Extension widgets for Tk
- ScrolledText — Scrolled Text Widget
- turtle — Turtle graphics for Tk
- IDLE
- Other Graphical User Interface Packages
Development Tools
- pydoc — Documentation generator and online help system
- doctest — Test interactive Python examples
- unittest — Unit testing framework
- 2to3 - Automated Python 2 to 3 code translation
- test — Regression tests package for Python
- test.test_support — Utility functions for tests
Debugging and Profiling
- bdb — Debugger framework
- pdb — The Python Debugger
- Debugger Commands
- How It Works
- The Python Profilers
- hotshot — High performance logging profiler
- timeit — Measure execution time of small code snippets
- trace — Trace or track Python statement execution
Python Runtime Services
- sys — System-specific parameters and functions
- __builtin__ — Built-in objects
- future_builtins — Python 3 builtins
- __main__ — Top-level script environment
- warnings — Warning control
- contextlib — Utilities for with-statement contexts.
- abc — Abstract Base Classes
- atexit — Exit handlers
- traceback — Print or retrieve a stack traceback
- __future__ — Future statement definitions
- gc — Garbage Collector interface
- inspect — Inspect live objects
- site — Site-specific configuration hook
- user — User-specific configuration hook
- fpectl — Floating point exception control
Custom Python Interpreters
- code — Interpreter base classes
- codeop — Compile Python code
Restricted Execution
- rexec — Restricted execution framework
- Bastion — Restricting access to objects
Importing Modules
- imp — Access the import internals
- imputil — Import utilities
- zipimport — Import modules from Zip archives
- pkgutil — Package extension utility
- modulefinder — Find modules used by a script
- runpy — Locating and executing Python modules
Python Language Services
- parser — Access Python parse trees
- Abstract Syntax Trees
- symtable — Access to the compiler’s symbol tables
- symbol — Constants used with Python parse trees
- token — Constants used with Python parse trees
- keyword — Testing for Python keywords
- tokenize — Tokenizer for Python source
- tabnanny — Detection of ambiguous indentation
- pyclbr — Python class browser support
- py_compile — Compile Python source files
- compileall — Byte-compile Python libraries
- dis — Disassembler for Python bytecode
- pickletools — Tools for pickle developers.
- distutils — Building and installing Python modules
Python compiler package
- The basic interface
- Limitations
- Python Abstract Syntax
- Using Visitors to Walk ASTs
- Bytecode Generation
Miscellaneous Services
- formatter — Generic output formatting
MS Windows Specific Services
- msilib — Read and write Microsoft Installer files
- msvcrt – Useful routines from the MS VC++ runtime
- _winreg – Windows registry access
- winsound — Sound-playing interface for Windows
Unix Specific Services
- posix — The most common POSIX system calls
- pwd — The password database
- spwd — The shadow password database
- grp — The group database
- crypt — Function to check Unix passwords
- dl — Call C functions in shared objects
- termios — POSIX style tty control
- tty — Terminal control functions
- pty — Pseudo-terminal utilities
- fcntl — The fcntl and ioctl system calls
- pipes — Interface to shell pipelines
- posixfile — File-like objects with locking support
- resource — Resource usage information
- nis — Interface to Sun’s NIS (Yellow Pages)
- syslog — Unix syslog library routines
- commands — Utilities for running commands
Mac OS X specific services
- ic — Access to the Mac OS X Internet Config
- MacOS — Access to Mac OS interpreter features
- macostools — Convenience routines for file manipulation
- findertools — The finder‘s Apple Events interface
- EasyDialogs — Basic Macintosh dialogs
- FrameWork — Interactive application framework
- autoGIL — Global Interpreter Lock handling in event loops
- Mac OS Toolbox Modules
- ColorPicker — Color selection dialog
MacPython OSA Modules
- gensuitemodule — Generate OSA stub packages
- aetools — OSA client support
- aepack — Conversion between Python variables and AppleEvent data containers
- aetypes — AppleEvent objects
- MiniAEFrame — Open Scripting Architecture server support
SGI IRIX Specific Services
- al — Audio functions on the SGI
- AL — Constants used with the al module
- cd — CD-ROM access on SGI systems
- fl — FORMS library for graphical user interfaces
- FL — Constants used with the fl module
- flp — Functions for loading stored FORMS designs
- fm — Font Manager interface
- gl — Graphics Library interface
- DEVICE — Constants used with the gl module
- GL — Constants used with the gl module
- imgfile — Support for SGI imglib files
- jpeg — Read and write JPEG files
SunOS Specific Services
- sunaudiodev — Access to Sun audio hardware
- SUNAUDIODEV — Constants used with sunaudiodev
Undocumented Modules
- Miscellaneous useful utilities
- Platform specific modules
- Multimedia
- Undocumented Mac OS modules
- Obsolete
- SGI-specific Extension modules