Python Standard Library is an essential guide for serious Pythonprogrammers. Python is a modular language that imports most useful operations from the standard library (basic support modules; operating system interfaces; network protocols; file formats; data conversions; threads and processes; and data storage). You can't really program in Python without using it. In this book, author Fredrik Lundh, creator of the Python Imaging Library (PIL), delivers tested, accurate documentation of all the modules in the Python Standard Library, along with over 300 annotated example scripts using the modules.

Python Standard Library renders this valuable information in a clean, easy-to-read format, yet doesn't talk down to readers. This accurate and complete reference documentation is for the Python programmer who wants the facts and little else.

The book is based on the author's work with the Python newsgroup: he reviewed more than 2500 questions and answers to that newsgroup in order to make sure the book covered what Python users really wanted to know. An earlier version of this book has been available electronically for over a year, so the material has been tested by Python programmers in real-life applications.

This version of Python Standard Library covers all the new modules and related information for Python 2.0, the first new major release of Python in four years.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Core Modules

Introduction

The Builtin Module

The Exceptions Module

The Os Module

The Os.Path Module

The Stat Module

The String Module

The Re Module

The Math Module

The Cmath Module

The Operator Module

The Copy Module

The Sys Module

The Atexit Module

The Time Module

The Types Module

The Gc Module

Chapter 2: More Standard Modules

Overview

The Fileinput Module

The Shutil Module

The Tempfile Module

The Stringio Module

The Cstringio Module

The Mmap Module

The Userdict Module

The Userlist Module

The Userstring Module

The Traceback Module

The Errno Module

The Getopt Module

The Getpass Module

The Glob Module

The Fnmatch Module

The Random Module

The Whrandom Module

The Md5 Module

The Sha Module

The Crypt Module

The Rotor Module

The Zlib Module

The Code Module

Chapter 3: Threads And Processes

Overview

The Threading Module

The Queue Module

The Thread Module

The Commands Module

The Pipes Module

The Popen2 Module

The Signal Module

Chapter 4: Data Representation

Overview

The Array Module

The Struct Module

The Xdrlib Module

The Marshal Module

The Pickle Module

The Cpickle Module

The Copy_Reg Module

The Pprint Module

The Repr Module

The Base64 Module

The Binhex Module

The Quopri Module

The Uu Module

The Binascii Module

Chapter 5: File Formats

Overview

The Xmllib Module

The Xml.Parsers.Expat Module

The Sgmllib Module

The Htmllib Module

The Htmlentitydefs Module

The Formatter Module

The Configparser Module

The Netrc Module

The Shlex Module

The Zipfile Module

The Gzip Module

Chapter 6: Mail And News Message Processing

Overview

The Rfc822 Module

The Mimetools Module

The Mimewriter Module

The Mailbox Module

The Mailcap Module

The Mimetypes Module

The Packmail Module

The Mimify Module

The Multifile Module

Chapter 7: Network Protocols

Overview

The Socket Module

The Select Module

The Asyncore Module

The Asynchat Module

The Urllib Module

The Urlparse Module

The Cookie Module

The Robotparser Module

The Ftplib Module

The Gopherlib Module

The Httplib Module

The Poplib Module

The Imaplib Module

The Smtplib Module

The Telnetlib Module

The Nntplib Module

The Socketserver Module

The Basehttpserver Module

The Simplehttpserver Module

The Cgihttpserver Module

The Cgi Module

The Webbrowser Module

Chapter 8: Internationalization

The Locale Module

The Unicodedata Module

The Ucnhash Module

Chapter 9: Multimedia Modules

Overview

The Imghdr Module

The Sndhdr Module

The Whatsound Module

The Aifc Module

The Sunau Module

The Sunaudio Module

The Wave Module

The Audiodev Module

The Winsound Module

The Colorsys Module

Chapter 10: Data Storage Overview

The Anydbm Module

The Whichdb Module

The Shelve Module

The Dbhash Module

The Dbm Module

The Dumbdbm Module

The Gdbm Module

Chapter 11: Tools and Utilities

The Dis Module

The Pdb Module

The Bdb Module

The Profile Module

The Pstats Module

The Tabnanny Module

Chapter 12: Platform-Specific Modules Overview

The Fcntl Module

The Pwd Module

The Grp Module

The Nis Module

The Curses Module

The Termios Module

The Tty Module

The Resource Module

The Syslog Module

The Msvcrt Module

The Nt Module

The _Winreg Module

The Posix Module

Chapter 13: Implementation Support Modules

The Dospath Module

The Macpath Module

The Ntpath Module

The Posixpath Module

The Strop Module

The Imp Module

The New Module

The Pre Module

The Sre Module

The Py_Compile Module

The Compileall Module

The Ihooks Module

The Linecache Module

The Macurl2path Module

The Nturl2path Module

The Tokenize Module

The Keyword Module

The Parser Module

The Symbol Module

The Token Module

Chapter 14: Other Modules Overview

The Pyclbr Module

The Filecmp Module

The Cmd Module

The Rexec Module

The Bastion Module

The Readline Module

The Rlcompleter Module

The Statvfs Module

The Calendar Module

The Sched Module

The Statcache Module

The Grep Module

The Dircache Module

The Dircmp Module

The Cmp Module

The Cmpcache Module

The Util Module

The Soundex Module

The Timing Module

The Posixfile Module

The Bisect Module

The Knee Module

The Tzparse Module

The Regex Module

The Regsub Module

The Reconvert Module

The Regex_Syntax Module

The Find Module

Index