Python Tutorial, Release 3.12.

>>> dict([('sape', 4139), ('guido', 4127), ('jack', 4098)])

{'sape': 4139, 'guido': 4127, 'jack': 4098}

In addition, dict comprehensions can be used to create dictionaries from arbitrary key and value expressions:

>>> {x: x**2 for x in (2, 4, 6)}

{2: 4, 4: 16, 6: 36}

When the keys are simple strings, it is sometimes easier to specify pairs using keyword arguments:

>>> dict(sape=4139, guido=4127, jack=4098)

{'sape': 4139, 'guido': 4127, 'jack': 4098}

5.6 Looping Techniques

When looping through dictionaries, the key and corresponding value can be retrieved at the same time using the items()
method.

>>> knights = {'gallahad': 'the pure', 'robin': 'the brave'}

>>> for k, v in [Link]():
... print(k, v)
...
gallahad the pure
robin the brave

When looping through a sequence, the position index and corresponding value can be retrieved at the same time using the
enumerate() function.

>>> for i, v in enumerate(['tic', 'tac', 'toe']):

... print(i, v)
...
0 tic
1 tac
2 toe

To loop over two or more sequences at the same time, the entries can be paired with the zip() function.

>>> questions = ['name', 'quest', 'favorite color']

>>> answers = ['lancelot', 'the holy grail', 'blue']
>>> for q, a in zip(questions, answers):
... print('What is your {0}? It is {1}.'.format(q, a))
...
What is your name? It is lancelot.
What is your quest? It is the holy grail.
What is your favorite color? It is blue.

To loop over a sequence in reverse, first specify the sequence in a forward direction and then call the reversed()
function.

>>> for i in reversed(range(1, 10, 2)):

... print(i)
...
9
7
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5
3
1

To loop over a sequence in sorted order, use the sorted() function which returns a new sorted list while leaving the
source unaltered.

>>> basket = ['apple', 'orange', 'apple', 'pear', 'orange', 'banana']

>>> for i in sorted(basket):
... print(i)
...
apple
apple
banana
orange
orange
pear

Using set() on a sequence eliminates duplicate elements. The use of sorted() in combination with set() over a
sequence is an idiomatic way to loop over unique elements of the sequence in sorted order.

>>> basket = ['apple', 'orange', 'apple', 'pear', 'orange', 'banana']

>>> for f in sorted(set(basket)):
... print(f)
...
apple
banana
orange
pear

It is sometimes tempting to change a list while you are looping over it; however, it is often simpler and safer to create a
new list instead.

>>> import math

>>> raw_data = [56.2, float('NaN'), 51.7, 55.3, 52.5, float('NaN'), 47.8]
>>> filtered_data = []
>>> for value in raw_data:
... if not [Link](value):
... filtered_data.append(value)
...
>>> filtered_data
[56.2, 51.7, 55.3, 52.5, 47.8]

5.7 More on Conditions

The conditions used in while and if statements can contain any operators, not just comparisons.
The comparison operators in and not in are membership tests that determine whether a value is in (or not in) a
container. The operators is and is not compare whether two objects are really the same object. All comparison
operators have the same priority, which is lower than that of all numerical operators.
Comparisons can be chained. For example, a < b == c tests whether a is less than b and moreover b equals c.
Comparisons may be combined using the Boolean operators and and or, and the outcome of a comparison (or of any
other Boolean expression) may be negated with not. These have lower priorities than comparison operators; between

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them, not has the highest priority and or the lowest, so that A and not B or C is equivalent to (A and (not
B)) or C. As always, parentheses can be used to express the desired composition.
The Boolean operators and and or are so-called short-circuit operators: their arguments are evaluated from left to right,
and evaluation stops as soon as the outcome is determined. For example, if A and C are true but B is false, A and B
and C does not evaluate the expression C. When used as a general value and not as a Boolean, the return value of a
short-circuit operator is the last evaluated argument.
It is possible to assign the result of a comparison or other Boolean expression to a variable. For example,

>>> string1, string2, string3 = '', 'Trondheim', 'Hammer Dance'

>>> non_null = string1 or string2 or string3
>>> non_null
'Trondheim'

Note that in Python, unlike C, assignment inside expressions must be done explicitly with the walrus operator :=. This
avoids a common class of problems encountered in C programs: typing = in an expression when == was intended.

5.8 Comparing Sequences and Other Types

Sequence objects typically may be compared to other objects with the same sequence type. The comparison uses lexico-
graphical ordering: first the first two items are compared, and if they differ this determines the outcome of the comparison;
if they are equal, the next two items are compared, and so on, until either sequence is exhausted. If two items to be com-
pared are themselves sequences of the same type, the lexicographical comparison is carried out recursively. If all items
of two sequences compare equal, the sequences are considered equal. If one sequence is an initial sub-sequence of the
other, the shorter sequence is the smaller (lesser) one. Lexicographical ordering for strings uses the Unicode code point
number to order individual characters. Some examples of comparisons between sequences of the same type:

(1, 2, 3) < (1, 2, 4)

[1, 2, 3] < [1, 2, 4]
'ABC' < 'C' < 'Pascal' < 'Python'
(1, 2, 3, 4) < (1, 2, 4)
(1, 2) < (1, 2, -1)
(1, 2, 3) == (1.0, 2.0, 3.0)
(1, 2, ('aa', 'ab')) < (1, 2, ('abc', 'a'), 4)

Note that comparing objects of different types with < or > is legal provided that the objects have appropriate compar-
ison methods. For example, mixed numeric types are compared according to their numeric value, so 0 equals 0.0, etc.
Otherwise, rather than providing an arbitrary ordering, the interpreter will raise a TypeError exception.

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 CHAPTER

SIX

MODULES

If you quit from the Python interpreter and enter it again, the definitions you have made (functions and variables) are lost.
Therefore, if you want to write a somewhat longer program, you are better off using a text editor to prepare the input
for the interpreter and running it with that file as input instead. This is known as creating a script. As your program gets
longer, you may want to split it into several files for easier maintenance. You may also want to use a handy function that
you’ve written in several programs without copying its definition into each program.
To support this, Python has a way to put definitions in a file and use them in a script or in an interactive instance of the
interpreter. Such a file is called a module; definitions from a module can be imported into other modules or into the main
module (the collection of variables that you have access to in a script executed at the top level and in calculator mode).
A module is a file containing Python definitions and statements. The file name is the module name with the suffix .py
appended. Within a module, the module’s name (as a string) is available as the value of the global variable __name__.
For instance, use your favorite text editor to create a file called [Link] in the current directory with the following
contents:
# Fibonacci numbers module

def fib(n): # write Fibonacci series up to n

a, b = 0, 1
while a < n:
print(a, end=' ')
a, b = b, a+b
print()

def fib2(n): # return Fibonacci series up to n

result = []
a, b = 0, 1
while a < n:
[Link](a)
a, b = b, a+b
return result

Now enter the Python interpreter and import this module with the following command:
>>> import fibo

This does not add the names of the functions defined in fibo directly to the current namespace (see Python Scopes and
Namespaces for more details); it only adds the module name fibo there. Using the module name you can access the
functions:
>>> [Link](1000)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987
>>> fibo.fib2(100)
[0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89]
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>>> fibo.__name__
'fibo'

If you intend to use a function often you can assign it to a local name:

>>> fib = [Link]

>>> fib(500)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377

6.1 More on Modules

A module can contain executable statements as well as function definitions. These statements are intended to initialize
the module. They are executed only the first time the module name is encountered in an import statement.1 (They are
also run if the file is executed as a script.)
Each module has its own private namespace, which is used as the global namespace by all functions defined in the module.
Thus, the author of a module can use global variables in the module without worrying about accidental clashes with a
user’s global variables. On the other hand, if you know what you are doing you can touch a module’s global variables with
the same notation used to refer to its functions, [Link].
Modules can import other modules. It is customary but not required to place all import statements at the beginning
of a module (or script, for that matter). The imported module names, if placed at the top level of a module (outside any
functions or classes), are added to the module’s global namespace.
There is a variant of the import statement that imports names from a module directly into the importing module’s
namespace. For example:

>>> from fibo import fib, fib2

>>> fib(500)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377

This does not introduce the module name from which the imports are taken in the local namespace (so in the example,
fibo is not defined).
There is even a variant to import all names that a module defines:

>>> from fibo import *

>>> fib(500)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377

This imports all names except those beginning with an underscore (_). In most cases Python programmers do not use
this facility since it introduces an unknown set of names into the interpreter, possibly hiding some things you have already
defined.
Note that in general the practice of importing * from a module or package is frowned upon, since it often causes poorly
readable code. However, it is okay to use it to save typing in interactive sessions.
If the module name is followed by as, then the name following as is bound directly to the imported module.

>>> import fibo as fib

>>> [Link](500)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377

1 In fact function definitions are also ‘statements’ that are ‘executed’; the execution of a module-level function definition adds the function name to

the module’s global namespace.

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This is effectively importing the module in the same way that import fibo will do, with the only difference of it being
available as fib.
It can also be used when utilising from with similar effects:

>>> from fibo import fib as fibonacci

>>> fibonacci(500)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377

Note: For efficiency reasons, each module is only imported once per interpreter session. Therefore, if you change your
modules, you must restart the interpreter – or, if it’s just one module you want to test interactively, use importlib.
reload(), e.g. import importlib; [Link](modulename).

6.1.1 Executing modules as scripts

When you run a Python module with

python [Link] <arguments>

the code in the module will be executed, just as if you imported it, but with the __name__ set to "__main__". That
means that by adding this code at the end of your module:

if __name__ == "__main__":
import sys
fib(int([Link][1]))

you can make the file usable as a script as well as an importable module, because the code that parses the command line
only runs if the module is executed as the “main” file:

$ python [Link] 50
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34

If the module is imported, the code is not run:

>>> import fibo

>>>

This is often used either to provide a convenient user interface to a module, or for testing purposes (running the module
as a script executes a test suite).

6.1.2 The Module Search Path

When a module named spam is imported, the interpreter first searches for a built-in module with that name. These module
names are listed in sys.builtin_module_names. If not found, it then searches for a file named [Link] in a
list of directories given by the variable [Link]. [Link] is initialized from these locations:
• The directory containing the input script (or the current directory when no file is specified).
• PYTHONPATH (a list of directory names, with the same syntax as the shell variable PATH).
• The installation-dependent default (by convention including a site-packages directory, handled by the site
module).

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More details are at sys-path-init.

Note: On file systems which support symlinks, the directory containing the input script is calculated after the symlink
is followed. In other words the directory containing the symlink is not added to the module search path.

After initialization, Python programs can modify [Link]. The directory containing the script being run is placed
at the beginning of the search path, ahead of the standard library path. This means that scripts in that directory will be
loaded instead of modules of the same name in the library directory. This is an error unless the replacement is intended.
See section Standard Modules for more information.

6.1.3 “Compiled” Python files

To speed up loading modules, Python caches the compiled version of each module in the __pycache__ directory under
the name [Link], where the version encodes the format of the compiled file; it generally contains
the Python version number. For example, in CPython release 3.3 the compiled version of [Link] would be cached
as __pycache__/[Link]. This naming convention allows compiled modules from different re-
leases and different versions of Python to coexist.
Python checks the modification date of the source against the compiled version to see if it’s out of date and needs to be
recompiled. This is a completely automatic process. Also, the compiled modules are platform-independent, so the same
library can be shared among systems with different architectures.
Python does not check the cache in two circumstances. First, it always recompiles and does not store the result for the
module that’s loaded directly from the command line. Second, it does not check the cache if there is no source module.
To support a non-source (compiled only) distribution, the compiled module must be in the source directory, and there
must not be a source module.
Some tips for experts:
• You can use the -O or -OO switches on the Python command to reduce the size of a compiled module. The
-O switch removes assert statements, the -OO switch removes both assert statements and __doc__ strings. Since
some programs may rely on having these available, you should only use this option if you know what you’re do-
ing. “Optimized” modules have an opt- tag and are usually smaller. Future releases may change the effects of
optimization.
• A program doesn’t run any faster when it is read from a .pyc file than when it is read from a .py file; the only
thing that’s faster about .pyc files is the speed with which they are loaded.
• The module compileall can create .pyc files for all modules in a directory.
• There is more detail on this process, including a flow chart of the decisions, in PEP 3147.

6.2 Standard Modules

Python comes with a library of standard modules, described in a separate document, the Python Library Reference
(“Library Reference” hereafter). Some modules are built into the interpreter; these provide access to operations that are
not part of the core of the language but are nevertheless built in, either for efficiency or to provide access to operating
system primitives such as system calls. The set of such modules is a configuration option which also depends on the
underlying platform. For example, the winreg module is only provided on Windows systems. One particular module
deserves some attention: sys, which is built into every Python interpreter. The variables sys.ps1 and sys.ps2
define the strings used as primary and secondary prompts:

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>>> import sys

>>> sys.ps1
'>>> '
>>> sys.ps2
'... '
>>> sys.ps1 = 'C> '
C> print('Yuck!')
Yuck!
C>

These two variables are only defined if the interpreter is in interactive mode.
The variable [Link] is a list of strings that determines the interpreter’s search path for modules. It is initialized to a
default path taken from the environment variable PYTHONPATH, or from a built-in default if PYTHONPATH is not set.
You can modify it using standard list operations:

>>> import sys

>>> [Link]('/ufs/guido/lib/python')

6.3 The dir() Function

The built-in function dir() is used to find out which names a module defines. It returns a sorted list of strings:

>>> import fibo, sys

>>> dir(fibo)
['__name__', 'fib', 'fib2']
>>> dir(sys)
['__breakpointhook__', '__displayhook__', '__doc__', '__excepthook__',
'__interactivehook__', '__loader__', '__name__', '__package__', '__spec__',
'__stderr__', '__stdin__', '__stdout__', '__unraisablehook__',
'_clear_type_cache', '_current_frames', '_debugmallocstats', '_framework',
'_getframe', '_git', '_home', '_xoptions', 'abiflags', 'addaudithook',
'api_version', 'argv', 'audit', 'base_exec_prefix', 'base_prefix',
'breakpointhook', 'builtin_module_names', 'byteorder', 'call_tracing',
'callstats', 'copyright', 'displayhook', 'dont_write_bytecode', 'exc_info',
'excepthook', 'exec_prefix', 'executable', 'exit', 'flags', 'float_info',
'float_repr_style', 'get_asyncgen_hooks', 'get_coroutine_origin_tracking_depth',
'getallocatedblocks', 'getdefaultencoding', 'getdlopenflags',
'getfilesystemencodeerrors', 'getfilesystemencoding', 'getprofile',
'getrecursionlimit', 'getrefcount', 'getsizeof', 'getswitchinterval',
'gettrace', 'hash_info', 'hexversion', 'implementation', 'int_info',
'intern', 'is_finalizing', 'last_traceback', 'last_type', 'last_value',
'maxsize', 'maxunicode', 'meta_path', 'modules', 'path', 'path_hooks',
'path_importer_cache', 'platform', 'prefix', 'ps1', 'ps2', 'pycache_prefix',
'set_asyncgen_hooks', 'set_coroutine_origin_tracking_depth', 'setdlopenflags',
'setprofile', 'setrecursionlimit', 'setswitchinterval', 'settrace', 'stderr',
'stdin', 'stdout', 'thread_info', 'unraisablehook', 'version', 'version_info',
'warnoptions']

Without arguments, dir() lists the names you have defined currently:

>>> a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
>>> import fibo
>>> fib = [Link]
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>>> dir()
['__builtins__', '__name__', 'a', 'fib', 'fibo', 'sys']

Note that it lists all types of names: variables, modules, functions, etc.
dir() does not list the names of built-in functions and variables. If you want a list of those, they are defined in the
standard module builtins:

>>> import builtins

>>> dir(builtins)
['ArithmeticError', 'AssertionError', 'AttributeError', 'BaseException',
'BlockingIOError', 'BrokenPipeError', 'BufferError', 'BytesWarning',
'ChildProcessError', 'ConnectionAbortedError', 'ConnectionError',
'ConnectionRefusedError', 'ConnectionResetError', 'DeprecationWarning',
'EOFError', 'Ellipsis', 'EnvironmentError', 'Exception', 'False',
'FileExistsError', 'FileNotFoundError', 'FloatingPointError',
'FutureWarning', 'GeneratorExit', 'IOError', 'ImportError',
'ImportWarning', 'IndentationError', 'IndexError', 'InterruptedError',
'IsADirectoryError', 'KeyError', 'KeyboardInterrupt', 'LookupError',
'MemoryError', 'NameError', 'None', 'NotADirectoryError', 'NotImplemented',
'NotImplementedError', 'OSError', 'OverflowError',
'PendingDeprecationWarning', 'PermissionError', 'ProcessLookupError',
'ReferenceError', 'ResourceWarning', 'RuntimeError', 'RuntimeWarning',
'StopIteration', 'SyntaxError', 'SyntaxWarning', 'SystemError',
'SystemExit', 'TabError', 'TimeoutError', 'True', 'TypeError',
'UnboundLocalError', 'UnicodeDecodeError', 'UnicodeEncodeError',
'UnicodeError', 'UnicodeTranslateError', 'UnicodeWarning', 'UserWarning',
'ValueError', 'Warning', 'ZeroDivisionError', '_', '__build_class__',
'__debug__', '__doc__', '__import__', '__name__', '__package__', 'abs',
'all', 'any', 'ascii', 'bin', 'bool', 'bytearray', 'bytes', 'callable',
'chr', 'classmethod', 'compile', 'complex', 'copyright', 'credits',
'delattr', 'dict', 'dir', 'divmod', 'enumerate', 'eval', 'exec', 'exit',
'filter', 'float', 'format', 'frozenset', 'getattr', 'globals', 'hasattr',
'hash', 'help', 'hex', 'id', 'input', 'int', 'isinstance', 'issubclass',
'iter', 'len', 'license', 'list', 'locals', 'map', 'max', 'memoryview',
'min', 'next', 'object', 'oct', 'open', 'ord', 'pow', 'print', 'property',
'quit', 'range', 'repr', 'reversed', 'round', 'set', 'setattr', 'slice',
'sorted', 'staticmethod', 'str', 'sum', 'super', 'tuple', 'type', 'vars',
'zip']

6.4 Packages

Packages are a way of structuring Python’s module namespace by using “dotted module names”. For example, the module
name A.B designates a submodule named B in a package named A. Just like the use of modules saves the authors of
different modules from having to worry about each other’s global variable names, the use of dotted module names saves
the authors of multi-module packages like NumPy or Pillow from having to worry about each other’s module names.
Suppose you want to design a collection of modules (a “package”) for the uniform handling of sound files and sound
data. There are many different sound file formats (usually recognized by their extension, for example: .wav, .aiff,
.au), so you may need to create and maintain a growing collection of modules for the conversion between the various
file formats. There are also many different operations you might want to perform on sound data (such as mixing, adding
echo, applying an equalizer function, creating an artificial stereo effect), so in addition you will be writing a never-ending
stream of modules to perform these operations. Here’s a possible structure for your package (expressed in terms of a
hierarchical filesystem):

54 Chapter 6. Modules