Jython Essentials

Chapter 11. Jython Standard Library

The philosophy behind Python is “Batteries included.” As a result, Python ships with more than 100 standard modules that cover all kinds of functionality, from file manipulation to network protocols to unit testing to encryption, and so on. As we’ve seen, in addition to containing the majority of the Python standard library, Jython also includes another set of “batteries”—the standard Java API.

This chapter shows how to use a few of the most useful elements of the Python library from Jython. We chose the modules for this chapter for two reasons. Some modules, such as os or sys, are so commonly used in Jython that you’ll need them for nearly anything you write. Others, such as re or unittest, offer functionality that is either not implemented or awkwardly implemented in the Java API. We did not include modules that had obvious Java counterparts (such as math or random), or if they were covered elsewhere in the book (such as exception or operator), or if they were considered less than essential. The CPython documentation contains full documentation on all CPython modules at http://www.python.org/doc/current/modindex.html—but see the next section for a sense of which modules will work with Jython. In addition, you can also see Python Standard Library, by Fredrik Lundh (O’Reilly), for additional samples of how the different modules are used.

Using Python Modules

Using a Python module is usually as simple as the import modulename statement. Most Python ...