8. 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:

• 8.1. datetime Basic date and time types
  • 8.1.1. Available Types
  • 8.1.2. timedelta Objects
  • 8.1.3. date Objects
  • 8.1.4. datetime Objects
  • 8.1.5. time Objects
  • 8.1.6. tzinfo Objects
  • 8.1.7. strftime() and strptime() Behavior
• 8.2. calendar General calendar-related functions
• 8.3. collections High-performance container datatypes
  • 8.3.1. Counter objects
  • 8.3.2. deque objects
    • 8.3.2.1. deque Recipes
  • 8.3.3. defaultdict objects
    • 8.3.3.1. defaultdict Examples
  • 8.3.4. namedtuple() Factory Function for Tuples with Named Fields
  • 8.3.5. OrderedDict objects
    • 8.3.5.1. OrderedDict Examples and Recipes
  • 8.3.6. Collections Abstract Base Classes
• 8.4. heapq Heap queue algorithm
  • 8.4.1. Basic Examples
  • 8.4.2. Priority Queue Implementation Notes
  • 8.4.3. Theory
• 8.5. bisect Array bisection algorithm
  • 8.5.1. Searching Sorted Lists
  • 8.5.2. Other Examples
• 8.6. array Efficient arrays of numeric values
• 8.7. sets Unordered collections of unique elements
  • 8.7.1. Set Objects
  • 8.7.2. Example
  • 8.7.3. Protocol for automatic conversion to immutable
  • 8.7.4. Comparison to the built-in set types
• 8.8. sched Event scheduler
  • 8.8.1. Scheduler Objects
• 8.9. mutex Mutual exclusion support
  • 8.9.1. Mutex Objects
• 8.10. Queue A synchronized queue class
  • 8.10.1. Queue Objects
• 8.11. weakref Weak references
  • 8.11.1. Weak Reference Objects
  • 8.11.2. Example
• 8.12. UserDict Class wrapper for dictionary objects
• 8.13. UserList Class wrapper for list objects
• 8.14. UserString Class wrapper for string objects
• 8.15. types Names for built-in types
• 8.16. new Creation of runtime internal objects
• 8.17. copy Shallow and deep copy operations
• 8.18. pprint Data pretty printer
  • 8.18.1. PrettyPrinter Objects
  • 8.18.2. pprint Example
• 8.19. repr Alternate repr() implementation
  • 8.19.1. Repr Objects
  • 8.19.2. Subclassing Repr Objects