The Python Standard Library and What Comes with Jython

Release:2.5 Date:March 02, 2011

While The Python Language Reference describes the exact syntax and semantics of the Python language, this library reference manual describes the standard library that is distributed with Jython. It also describes some of the optional components that are commonly included in Python distributions.

Python’s standard library is very extensive, offering a wide range of facilities. The library contains built-in modules (written in C) that provide access to system functionality such as file I/O that would otherwise be inaccessible to Python programmers, as well as modules written in Python that provide standardized solutions for many problems that occur in everyday programming. Some of these modules are explicitly designed to encourage and enhance the portability of Python programs by abstracting away platform-specifics into platform-neutral APIs.

Unlike the CPython distribution, Jython does not include built-in libraries written in C as they will not work on the Java platform. Instead, there are certain libraries that have been re-written in the Java languages to be included with Jython. Likewise, most of the modules written in Python are included with the Jython distribution as any Python that does not use C extensions should work on Jython.

In addition to the standard library, there is a growing collection of several thousand components (from individual programs and modules to packages and entire application development frameworks), available from the Python Package Index. Many of these can be used with Jython as well.

Note that this portion of the documentation is currently in progress, and therefore, it is incomplete at this time.

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Built-in Functions
  • 2.1. Non-essential Built-in Functions
• 3. Built-in Constants
  • 3.1. Constants added by the site module
• 4. Built-in Objects
• 5. Built-in Types
  • 5.1. Truth Value Testing
  • 5.2. Boolean Operations — and, or, not
  • 5.3. Comparisons
  • 5.4. Numeric Types — int, float, long, complex
  • 5.5. Iterator Types
  • 5.6. Sequence Types — str, unicode, list, tuple, buffer, xrange
  • 5.7. Set Types — set, frozenset
  • 5.8. Mapping Types — dict
  • 5.9. File Objects
  • 5.10. Context Manager Types
  • 5.11. Other Built-in Types
  • 5.12. Special Attributes
• 6. Built-in Exceptions
  • 6.1. Exception hierarchy
• 7. String Services
  • 7.1. string — Common string operations
  • 7.2. re — Regular expression operations
  • 7.3. struct — Interpret strings as packed binary data
  • 7.4. difflib — Helpers for computing deltas
  • 7.5. StringIO — Read and write strings as files
  • 7.6. cStringIO — Faster version of StringIO
  • 7.7. textwrap — Text wrapping and filling
  • 7.8. codecs — Codec registry and base classes
  • 7.9. unicodedata — Unicode Database
  • 7.10. fpformat — Floating point conversions
• 8. Data Types
  • 8.1. datetime — Basic date and time types
  • 8.2. calendar — General calendar-related functions
  • 8.3. collections — High-performance container datatypes
  • 8.4. heapq — Heap queue algorithm
  • 8.5. bisect — Array bisection algorithm
  • 8.6. array — Efficient arrays of numeric values
  • 8.7. sets — Unordered collections of unique elements
  • 8.8. sched — Event scheduler
  • 8.9. mutex — Mutual exclusion support
  • 8.10. Queue — A synchronized queue class
  • 8.11. weakref — Weak references
  • 8.12. UserDict — Class wrapper for dictionary objects
  • 8.13. UserList — Class wrapper for list objects
  • 8.14. UserString — Class wrapper for string objects
  • 8.15. types — Names for built-in types
  • 8.16. new — Creation of runtime internal objects
  • 8.17. copy — Shallow and deep copy operations
  • 8.18. pprint — Data pretty printer
  • 8.19. repr — Alternate repr() implementation
• 9. Numeric and Mathematical Modules
  • 9.1. math — Mathematical functions
  • 9.2. cmath — Mathematical functions for complex numbers
  • 9.3. decimal — Decimal fixed point and floating point arithmetic
  • 9.4. random — Generate pseudo-random numbers
  • 9.5. itertools — Functions creating iterators for efficient looping
  • 9.6. functools — Higher order functions and operations on callable objects
  • 9.7. operator — Standard operators as functions
• 10. File and Directory Access
  • 10.1. os.path — Common pathname manipulations
  • 10.2. fileinput — Iterate over lines from multiple input streams
  • 10.3. stat — Interpreting stat() results
  • 10.4. filecmp — File and Directory Comparisons
  • 10.5. tempfile — Generate temporary files and directories
  • 10.6. glob — Unix style pathname pattern expansion
  • 10.7. fnmatch — Unix filename pattern matching
  • 10.8. linecache — Random access to text lines
  • 10.9. shutil — High-level file operations
  • 10.10. dircache — Cached directory listings
  • 10.11. macpath — Mac OS 9 path manipulation functions
• 11. Data Persistence
• 12. Data Compression and Archiving
  • 12.1. zlib — Compression compatible with gzip
  • 12.2. gzip — Support for gzip files
  • 12.3. zipfile — Work with ZIP archives
  • 12.4. tarfile — Read and write tar archive files
• 13. File Formats
  • 13.1. csv — CSV File Reading and Writing
  • 13.2. ConfigParser — Configuration file parser
  • 13.3. robotparser — Parser for robots.txt
  • 13.4. netrc — netrc file processing
  • 13.5. xdrlib — Encode and decode XDR data
• 14. Cryptographic Services
  • 14.1. hashlib — Secure hashes and message digests
  • 14.2. hmac — Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication
  • 14.3. md5 — MD5 message digest algorithm
  • 14.4. sha — SHA-1 message digest algorithm
• 15. Generic Operating System Services
  • 15.1. os — Miscellaneous operating system interfaces
  • 15.2. time — Time access and conversions
  • 15.3. optparse — More powerful command line option parser
  • 15.4. getopt — Parser for command line options
  • 15.5. logging — Logging facility for Python
  • 15.6. getpass — Portable password input
  • 15.7. platform — Access to underlying platform’s identifying data.
  • 15.8. errno — Standard errno system symbols
• 16. Optional Operating System Services
  • 16.1. select — Waiting for I/O completion
  • 16.2. threading — Higher-level threading interface
  • 16.3. thread — Multiple threads of control
  • 16.4. dummy_thread — Drop-in replacement for the thread module
  • 16.5. rlcompleter — Completion function for GNU readline
• 17. Interprocess Communication and Networking
  • 17.1. subprocess — Subprocess management
  • 17.2. socket — Low-level networking interface
  • 17.3. ssl — SSL wrapper for socket objects
  • 17.4. signal — Set handlers for asynchronous events
  • 17.5. popen2 — Subprocesses with accessible I/O streams
  • 17.6. asyncore — Asynchronous socket handler
  • 17.7. asynchat — Asynchronous socket command/response handler
• 18. Internet Data Handling
  • 18.1. email — An email and MIME handling package
  • 18.2. mailcap — Mailcap file handling
  • 18.3. mailbox — Manipulate mailboxes in various formats
  • 18.4. mhlib — Access to MH mailboxes
  • 18.5. mimetools — Tools for parsing MIME messages
  • 18.6. mimetypes — Map filenames to MIME types
  • 18.7. MimeWriter — Generic MIME file writer
  • 18.8. mimify — MIME processing of mail messages
  • 18.9. multifile — Support for files containing distinct parts
  • 18.10. rfc822 — Parse RFC 2822 mail headers
  • 18.11. base64 — RFC 3548: Base16, Base32, Base64 Data Encodings
  • 18.12. binhex — Encode and decode binhex4 files
  • 18.13. binascii — Convert between binary and ASCII
  • 18.14. quopri — Encode and decode MIME quoted-printable data
  • 18.15. uu — Encode and decode uuencode files
• 19. Structured Markup Processing Tools
  • 19.1. HTMLParser — Simple HTML and XHTML parser
  • 19.2. sgmllib — Simple SGML parser
  • 19.3. htmllib — A parser for HTML documents
  • 19.4. htmlentitydefs — Definitions of HTML general entities
  • 19.5. xml.parsers.expat — Fast XML parsing using Expat
  • 19.6. xml.dom — The Document Object Model API
  • 19.7. xml.dom.minidom — Lightweight DOM implementation
  • 19.8. xml.dom.pulldom — Support for building partial DOM trees
  • 19.9. xml.sax — Support for SAX2 parsers
  • 19.10. xml.sax.handler — Base classes for SAX handlers
• 20. Internet Protocols and Support
  • 20.1. webbrowser — Convenient Web-browser controller
  • 20.2. cgi — Common Gateway Interface support.
  • 20.3. cgitb — Traceback manager for CGI scripts
  • 20.4. wsgiref — WSGI Utilities and Reference Implementation
  • 20.5. urllib — Open arbitrary resources by URL
  • 20.6. urllib2 — extensible library for opening URLs
  • 20.7. httplib — HTTP protocol client
  • 20.8. ftplib — FTP protocol client
  • 20.9. poplib — POP3 protocol client
  • 20.10. imaplib — IMAP4 protocol client
  • 20.11. nntplib — NNTP protocol client
  • 20.12. smtplib — SMTP protocol client
  • 20.13. smtpd — SMTP Server
  • 20.14. telnetlib — Telnet client
  • 20.15. uuid — UUID objects according to RFC 4122
  • 20.16. urlparse — Parse URLs into components
  • 20.17. SocketServer — A framework for network servers
  • 20.18. BaseHTTPServer — Basic HTTP server
  • 20.19. SimpleHTTPServer — Simple HTTP request handler
  • 20.20. CGIHTTPServer — CGI-capable HTTP request handler
  • 20.21. cookielib — Cookie handling for HTTP clients
  • 20.22. xmlrpclib — XML-RPC client access
  • 20.23. SimpleXMLRPCServer — Basic XML-RPC server
  • 20.24. DocXMLRPCServer — Self-documenting XML-RPC server
• 21. Multimedia Services
  • 21.1. aifc — Read and write AIFF and AIFC files
  • 21.2. chunk — Read IFF chunked data
  • 21.3. colorsys — Conversions between color systems
  • 21.4. imghdr — Determine the type of an image
  • 21.5. sndhdr — Determine type of sound file
• 22. Internationalization
• 23. Program Frameworks
  • 23.1. cmd — Support for line-oriented command interpreters
  • 23.2. shlex — Simple lexical analysis
• 24. Development Tools
  • 24.1. pydoc — Documentation generator and online help system
  • 24.2. doctest — Test interactive Python examples
  • 24.3. test — Regression tests package for Python
  • 24.4. test.test_support — Utility functions for tests
• 25. Debugging and Profiling
  • 25.1. bdb — Debugger framework
  • 25.2. pdb — The Python Debugger
  • 25.3. Debugger Commands
  • 25.4. The Python Profilers
  • 25.5. timeit — Measure execution time of small code snippets
  • 25.6. trace — Trace or track Python statement execution
• 26. Python Runtime Services
  • 26.1. sys — System-specific parameters and functions
  • 26.2. __builtin__ — Built-in objects
  • 26.3. __main__ — Top-level script environment
  • 26.4. warnings — Warning control
  • 26.5. contextlib — Utilities for with-statement contexts.
  • 26.6. atexit — Exit handlers
  • 26.7. traceback — Print or retrieve a stack traceback
  • 26.8. __future__ — Future statement definitions
  • 26.9. gc — Garbage Collector interface
  • 26.10. inspect — Inspect live objects
  • 26.11. site — Site-specific configuration hook
  • 26.12. user — User-specific configuration hook
• 27. Custom Python Interpreters
  • 27.1. code — Interpreter base classes
  • 27.2. codeop — Compile Python code
• 28. Importing Modules
  • 28.1. imp — Access the import internals
  • 28.2. zipimport — Import modules from Zip archives
  • 28.3. pkgutil — Package extension utility
  • 28.4. modulefinder — Find modules used by a script
  • 28.5. runpy — Locating and executing Python modules
• 29. Python Language Services
  • 29.1. Abstract Syntax Trees
  • 29.2. symbol — Constants used with Python parse trees
  • 29.3. token — Constants used with Python parse trees
  • 29.4. keyword — Testing for Python keywords
  • 29.5. tokenize — Tokenizer for Python source
  • 29.6. tabnanny — Detection of ambiguous indentation
  • 29.7. pyclbr — Python class browser support
  • 29.8. py_compile — Compile Python source files
  • 29.9. compileall — Byte-compile Python libraries
  • 29.10. dis — Disassembler for Python bytecode
  • 29.11. pickletools — Tools for pickle developers.
  • 29.12. distutils — Building and installing Python modules
• 30. Python compiler package
  • 30.1. The basic interface
  • 30.2. Limitations
  • 30.3. Python Abstract Syntax
  • 30.4. Using Visitors to Walk ASTs
  • 30.5. Bytecode Generation
• 31. Miscellaneous Services
• 32. Unix Specific Services
  • 32.1. posix — The most common POSIX system calls
  • 32.2. pwd — The password database
  • 32.3. grp — The group database
  • 32.4. pipes — Interface to shell pipelines
  • 32.5. posixfile — File-like objects with locking support
  • 32.6. commands — Utilities for running commands
• 35. Undocumented Modules
  • 35.1. Miscellaneous useful utilities
  • 35.2. Platform specific modules