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 examples in docstrings.
unittest   Unit testing framework for Python.
test   Regression tests package containing the testing suite for Python.
test.test_support  
math   Mathematical functions (sin() etc.).
cmath   Mathematical functions for complex numbers.
random   Generate pseudo-random numbers with various common distributions.
whrandom   Floating point pseudo-random number generator.
bisect   Array bisection algorithms for binary searching.
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.
ConfigParser   Configuration file parser.
fileinput   Perl-like iteration over lines from multiple input streams, with ``save in place'' capability.
xreadlines   Efficient iteration over the lines of a file.
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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