5. Miscellaneous Services

The modules described in this chapter provide miscellaneous services that are available in all Python versions. Here's an overview:

pydoc   Documentation generator and online help system.
doctest   A framework for verifying interactive Python examples.
unittest   Unit testing framework for Python.
test   Regression tests package containing the testing suite for Python.
test.test_support   Support for Python regression tests.
decimal   Implementation of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
math   Mathematical functions (sin() etc.).
cmath   Mathematical functions for complex numbers.
random   Generate pseudo-random numbers with various common distributions.
bisect   Array bisection algorithms for binary searching.
collections   High-performance datatypes
heapq   Heap queue algorithm (a.k.a. priority queue).
array   Efficient arrays of uniformly typed numeric values.
sets   Implementation of sets of unique elements.
itertools   Functions creating iterators for efficient looping.
functional   Higher-order functions and operations on callable objects.
ConfigParser   Configuration file parser.
fileinput   Perl-like iteration over lines from multiple input streams, with ``save in place'' capability.
calendar   Functions for working with calendars, including some emulation of the Unix cal program.
cmd   Build line-oriented command interpreters.
shlex   Simple lexical analysis for Unix shell-like languages.

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