The Python Standard Library

Python exposes a lot of built-in functionality through its standard library.

The standard library is a huge collection of all sort of utilities, ranging from math utilities to debugging to creating graphical user interfaces.

You can find the full list of standard library modules here: https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html

Some of the important modules are:

• math for math utilities
• re for regular expressions
• json to work with JSON
• datetime to work with dates
• sqlite3 to use SQLite
• os for Operating System utilities
• random for random number generation
• statistics for statistics utilities
• requests to perform HTTP network requests
• http to create HTTP servers
• urllib to manage URLs

Let’s introduce how to use a module of the standard library. You already know how to use modules you create, importing from other files in the program folder.

Well that’s the same with modules provided by the standard library:

import math

math.sqrt(4) # 2.0

or

from math import sqrt

sqrt(4) # 2.0

We’ll soon explore the most important modules individually to understand what we can do with them.