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.
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.
array   Efficient arrays of uniformly typed numeric values.
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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