Libraries
Python has a large standard library, commonly cited as one of Python's greatest strengths, providing tools suited to many tasks. This is deliberate and has been described as a "batteries included" Python philosophy. For Internet-facing applications, a large number of standard formats and protocols (such as MIME and HTTP) are supported. Modules for creating graphical user interfaces, connecting to relational databases, arithmetic with arbitrary precision decimals, manipulating regular expressions, and doing unit testing are also included. For software testing, the standard library provides the unittest and doctest modules.
Some parts of the standard library are covered by specifications (for example, the WSGI implementation wsgiref follows PEP 333), but the majority of the modules are not. They are specified by their code, internal documentation, and test suite (if supplied). However, because most of the standard library is cross-platform Python code, there are only a few modules that must be altered or completely rewritten by alternative implementations.
The standard library is not essential to run Python or embed Python within an application. Blender 2.49 for instance omits most of the standard library.
The Python Package Index, which is the official repository of third-party software for Python, contains over 25,000 "packages" covering a wide range of functionality, including:
- graphical user interface, web framework, multimedia, databases, networking and communications
- test frameworks, documentation tools, system administration
- scientific computing, text processing, image processing
Read more about this topic: Python Implementations
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