Python Standard Library

The Python standard library includes a wide variety of modules and packages that can help you accomplish many common programming tasks—from file input/output (I/O), regular expressions, and mathematical operations to networking, data serialization, and working with dates and times. This wide range of functionality is why the Python community often says that Python is batteries-included.

The standard library is designed to be both broad and deep. It includes modules for low-level system interaction like os, sys, and subprocess, as well as high-level tools like csv for handling structured text, json for working with JSON data, http.server for creating simple web servers, and sqlite3 for embedded databases.

You’ll also find powerful utilities like itertools and functools for functional programming patterns, collections for specialized data structures, and more.

Because these modules are part of the Python distribution itself, you don’t need to install anything separately—making it easy to write portable, efficient programs that work out of the box across different environments and platforms.

In practice, the standard library covers a wide variety of use cases, including:

  • System scripting and automation
  • Web development
  • Text and data processing
  • Basic networking and client-server communication
  • Concurrency and multithreading
  • Data storage and serialization

In short, the standard library is one of Python’s greatest strengths. It helps you do more with less—reducing the need for external dependencies while encouraging idiomatic, readable code.

  • argparse Provides a framework for creating user-friendly command-line interfaces (CLI).
  • array Provides an efficient data structure for creating arrays of values, which are stored more compactly than in standard lists.
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