05 Built-in Types

The following sections describe the standard types that are built into the interpreter.

Note

Historically (until release 2.2), Python’s built-in types have differed from user-defined types because it was not possible to use the built-in types as the basis for object-oriented inheritance. This limitation no longer exists.

The principal built-in types are numerics, sequences, mappings, files, classes, instances and exceptions.

Some operations are supported by several object types; in particular, practically all objects can be compared, tested for truth value, and converted to a string (with the repr() function or the slightly different str() function). The latter function is implicitly used when an object is written by the print() function.

Contents

• 1. Truth Value Testing
• 2. Boolean Operations — and, or, not
• 3. Comparisons
• 4. Numeric Types — int, float, long, complex
  • 4.1. Bitwise Operations on Integer Types
  • 4.2. Additional Methods on Integer Types
  • 4.3. Additional Methods on Float
• 5. Iterator Types
  • 5.1. Generator Types
• 6. Sequence Types — str, unicode, list, tuple, bytearray, buffer, xrange
  • 6.1. String Methods
  • 6.2. String Formatting Operations
  • 6.3. XRange Type
  • 6.4. Mutable Sequence Types
• 7. Set Types — set, frozenset
• 8. Mapping Types — dict
  • 8.1. Dictionary view objects
• 9. File Objects
• 10. memoryview type
• 11. Context Manager Types
• 12. Other Built-in Types
  • 12.1. Modules
  • 12.2. Classes and Class Instances
  • 12.3. Functions
  • 12.4. Methods
  • 12.5. Code Objects
  • 12.6. Type Objects
  • 12.7. The Null Object
  • 12.8. The Ellipsis Object
  • 12.9. The NotImplemented Object
  • 12.10. Boolean Values
  • 12.11. Internal Objects
• 13. Special Attributes