Supplemental data types and containers

In the Python's built-in types section, we concentrated mostly on those data types that have dedicated literals in the Python syntax. These were also the types that are implemented at the interpreter-level. However, Python's standard library offers a great collection of supplemental data types that can be effectively used in places where the basic built-in types show their shortcomings, or places where the nature of the data requires specialized handling (for example, in the presentation of time and dates).

The most common are data containers that are found in the collections, and we have already briefly mentioned two of them: deque and OrderedDict. However, the landscape of data structures available for Python programmers is enormous and almost every module of the Python standard library defines some specialized types for handling the data of different problem domains.

In this section, we will focus only on the types that can be considered as general-purpose.