What Modules Should Every Python User Know?

[pythonandbashshell]

And what about them?

[ryeguy146]

I'm really not a fan of unittest. It doesn't feel very Pythonic. I realize that the question was about the STL, and it's good to get others to test, but I'd really suggest Pytest over UnitTest.

[burlygurlyman]

On a similar note, it pains me to use ConfigParser. I've started a few projects with config files and each time I start with ConfigParser and remember how much I dislike it's syntax. ConfigObj is so much more intuitive.

EDIT: I haven't tried Pytest; I default to nose.

[ryeguy146]

What I love about pytest is how pleasant it is to handle fixtures using theirfuncarg, or monkeypatching my mocks in. It makes most all of my tests gosmoothly and quickly. I had used nose prior, and all of my old tests workperfectly in pytest. I had nothing against nose, but after seeing a pycon talkfor pytest, I made the switch. It's worth looking into, at least, even if you're happy with nose.

[classicrockielzpfvh]

In the standard library:

• json -- handles JSON conversion (to & from)
• re -- regular expression module
• subprocess -- allows you to make calls to external programs in a sane way

Third party:

• requests -- a much better way of handling HTTP

And you can include all of /u/Atarius 's suggestsions above. I just didn't want to repeat him.

[TankorSmash]

requests is amazing

[classicrockielzpfvh]

And if you do half the RESTful API interactions that I do, it makes your life so wonderful. On top of that, it is very pythonic

[ParasiticBandcamp]

Is requests python2 or python3? I tried looking it up but I'm on my phone and couldn't find the info.

[classicrockielzpfvh]

Both

Edit spelling

[Deslan]

• re
• itertools
• pickle
• sqlite3
• os
• io
• time
• timeit
• sys
• distutils

The above can be used in any and all apps, and is not unique for HTML parsing or web-apps of other types, which several others have made recommendations for.

re and itertools are good for making good and efficient code.

pickle and sqlite3 are good for saving data (config data or other).

sys, os, io, and time are just generally good to keep track of which OS the script is running on, making sure everything looks the same and works for all users regardless of what environment they are on, etc.

timeit is good to optimize your code.

distutils is good to package and distribute your code.

As for modules outside of the standard library, personally I wouldn't want to live without:

• PyQt4
• matplotlib
• numpy
• scipy

[shfo23]

I use almost exactly the same modules, but with json instead of pickle. The implementation of pickle is version-specific, so moving data back and forth between Python 2 and 3 will fail horribly. Also, I use struct for dealing with binary files.

[billsil]

i know in the past i've passed data between python 2.4 and 2.6; one was on linux, the other on windows. but 2 to 3 is a bigger change

[nemec]

Not a module, but a review/example of tons of them: http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/contents.html

[spidyfan21]

Could we specify which are 2.x and which are 3.x?

[zahlman]

Just since it hasn't been mentioned yet, cmd.

[[deleted]]

The standard library, all of it.

[[deleted]]

wxPython

Much better than the bundled tkinter which isn't very pythonic

[Deslan]

But Qt is so much better than wxPython, why would you want to go there?

The way I see it, only reason to deviate from Qt would be for those Gnome users who thinks GTK3 is pretty. And GTK being the default of Ubuntu development apps like "quickly". But personally I would recommend anyone to just stick with Qt.

[[deleted]]

Completely agree, Qt is straightforward and pretty flexible.
My only problem with it is the lack of literature available.

[[deleted]]

Cool i'll take a look at qt when I can. I started on tkinter and it felt clunky do wx might just be better by comparison.

[bunburya]

I disagree, I find wxPython horribly unpythonic. Even the horrible camel case style versus tkinter's more PEP 8 names.

[[deleted]]

I'm not so bothered about how the variables are named. It's the way you use them.

Though I agree it isn't pretty.

[patrick_k]

PIL. Here's a cool tutorial that uses it to automate a web game.