10.12. Batteries Included

Python has a “batteries included” philosophy. This is best seen through the sophisticated and robust capabilities of its larger packages. For example:

• The xmlrpclib and SimpleXMLRPCServer modules make implementing remote procedure calls into an almost trivial task. Despite the modules names, no direct knowledge or handling of XML is needed.
• The email package is a library for managing email messages, including MIME and other RFC 2822-based message documents. Unlike smtplib and poplib which actually send and receive messages, the email package has a complete toolset for building or decoding complex message structures (including attachments) and for implementing internet encoding and header protocols.
• The xml.dom and xml.sax packages provide robust support for parsing this popular data interchange format. Likewise, the csv module supports direct reads and writes in a common database format. Together, these modules and packages greatly simplify data interchange between Python applications and other tools.
• Internationalization is supported by a number of modules including gettext, locale, and the codecspackage.