Brief Tour of the Standard Library.md

Brief Tour of the Standard Library

#python

Python provides a set of rich builtins in the standard library for various programming purposes. Some examples include:

• os and shutil for interacting with the OS and daily file and directory management tasks, respectively.

• The glob module provides a function for making file lists from directory wildcard matches.

• sys and argparse provide mechanisms to process command line arguments.

• sys also provides stderr, stdin, and stdout attributes for redirecting the outputs of programs.

• re provides regular expression tools for advanced string processing.

• Mathematics: math for underlying C library functions which implement floating point math, random for making random selections, statistics for basic statistical properties.

• Internet Access: urllib.request and smtplib.

• Dates and Times: datetime has support for calendar arithmetic.

• Data Compression: zlib, gzip, bz2, lzma, zipfile, and tarfile

• Performance measurement: timeit provides a tool for immediately assessing performance duration. profile and pstats are additional modules that provide tools for identifying time critical sections in large blocks of code.

• Quality Assurance:

  • doctest provides a tool for scanning the docstring of a module for embedded test examples and validating them. 🤯

  def average(values): """Computes the arithmetic mean of a list of numbers.

  print(average([20, 30, 70])) 40.0 """ return sum(values) / len(values)

  import doctest doctest.testmod() # automatically validate the embedded tests

	- `unittest` is another module that allows a more comprehensive testing of python "units".
 
- Output Formatting: 
	- `reprlib` provides formatting for abbreviated displays of large deeply nested containers.
	- `pprint` for pretty printing.
	- `textwrap` for formatting paragraphs of text to fit a given screen width.
	- `locale` for culture specific data formats.
- Templating: String templating can be achieved by using the `Template` class from the `string` module.