Python: Essential Reference

12. Built-In Functions and Exceptions

This chapter describes Python’s built-in functions and exceptions. Much of this material is covered less formally in earlier chapters of this book. This chapter merely consolidates all this information into one section and expands upon some of the more subtle features of certain functions. Also, Python 2 includes a number of built-in functions that are considered to be obsolete and which have been removed from Python 3. Those functions are not documented here—instead the focus is on modern functionality.

Built-in Functions and Types

Certain types, functions, and variables are always available to the interpreter and can be used in any source module. Although you don’t need to perform any extra imports to ...