Python Pocket Reference

Other Built-in Modules

See the Python library reference manual (available at http://www.python.org) for details on other standard modules available to Python programmers. A partial sampling of commonly-used modules follows.

socket

Interfaces for sending and receiving data over BSD-style sockets (an object with socket call methods).

rexec

Support for restricted (trusted/safe) execution mode. Especially useful for Internet-related applications.

Tkinter

Interface to Python’s integration of the Tk GUI API. Used for writing portable graphical interfaces with native look-and-feel on X-Windows, MS-Windows, and Macintosh. Widgets are customizable classes (e.g., Button, Frame), options are keyword arguments, and composition is object embedding (not paths).

select

Interfaces to UNIX select function. Wait for activity on one of N files or sockets (multiplex).

signal

Interfaces for processing signals in Python programs.

thread, threading

Python’s thread interface (lightweight processes which share global data). Tools to start, stop, synchronize.

cgi

Interfaces for parsing and accessing form information in CGI Internet scripts. After a script calls “form = cgi.FieldStorage( ),” form is a dictionary-like object with one entry per form field (form [“name” ].value).

urllib, httplib, HTMLlib

Accessing arbitrary Internet URLs like files, http protocol tools, parsing HTML files.

ftplib

Interfaces for Internet file transfers in Python programs. After “ftp=ftplib.FTP(‘sitename’),” ftp has methods for login, changing ...