08. Data Types

The modules described in this chapter provide a variety of specialized data types such as dates and times, fixed-type arrays, heap queues, synchronized queues, and sets.

Python also provides some built-in data types, in particular, dict, list, set (which along with frozenset, replaces the deprecated sets module), and tuple. The str class can be used to handle binary data and 8-bit text, and the unicode class to handle Unicode text.

The following modules are documented in this chapter:

• 1. datetime — Basic date and time types
• 2. calendar — General calendar-related functions
• 3. collections — High-performance container datatypes
• 4. heapq — Heap queue algorithm
• 5. bisect — Array bisection algorithm
• 6. array — Efficient arrays of numeric values
• 7. sets — Unordered collections of unique elements
• 8. sched — Event scheduler
• 9. mutex — Mutual exclusion support
• 10. Queue — A synchronized queue class
• 11. weakref — Weak references
• 12. UserDict — Class wrapper for dictionary objects
• 13. UserList — Class wrapper for list objects
• 14. UserString — Class wrapper for string objects
• 15. types — Names for built-in types
• 16. new — Creation of runtime internal objects
• 17. copy — Shallow and deep copy operations
• 18. pprint — Data pretty printer
• 19. repr — Alternate repr() implementation