CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonstandard-library
user3791157
user3791157

Reputation: 57

How can i access the python standard library files?

I just started learning python not too long ago, and I was hoping to learn more about how the functions and methods of the modules I import actually work.

I was hoping that python libraries would kind of be like javascript frameworks- where i can go into an imported file and see the actual code that the framework/module is built with.

But when i dug around in the python sub directories, i found that the modules were in .lib format.

So are standard library modules actual python code that i could somehow inspect the functions of? Or are they too deeply integrated for me to be able to study them like that?

On a side note, would the same rules apply for non-standard library imports, i.e. beautifulsoup? I was kind of hoping to look at the code to understand how webscraping works from the ground up

Thanks

Upvotes: 3

Views: 4764

Answers (1)

chris-sc
chris-sc

Reputation: 1718

As mentioned in the comment above you can look at additional packages such as beautifulsoup in your site-packages folder.

Standard library modules can be written in pure Python, but not all are. When you want to take a look at such modules you can start and browse the CPython source code online (http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/).

There you find different folders:

  • Lib/: Many of the pure Python modules (for example the os or copy module)
  • Objects/: Here are the C source files for things such as lists or dictionaries

If you want to have a look at a module from the standard library, try if you find a file like os.py for the os module in the Lib/-folder.

If you installed the module (either with pip or any other package manager) locate your site-packages folder and look for the source files of the module there.

This should give you a good starting point.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions