built-in functions and exceptions his describes python' built-in functions and exceptions much of this material is covered less formally in earlier of this book this merely consolidates all this information into one section and expands upon some of the more subtle features of certain functions alsopython includes number of built-in functions that are considered to be obsolete and which have been removed from python those functions are not documented here--instead the focus is on modern functionality built-in functions and types certain typesfunctionsand variables are always available to the interpreter and can be used in any source module although you don' need to perform any extra imports to access these functionsthey are contained in module _builtin_ in python and in module builtins in python within other modules that you importthe variable _builtins_ is also bound to this module abs(xreturns the absolute value of all(sreturns true if all of the values in the iterable evaluate as true any(sreturns true if any of the values in the iterable evaluate as true ascii(xcreates printable representation of the object just like the repr()but only uses ascii characters in the result non-ascii characters are turned into appropriate escape sequences this can be used to view unicode strings in terminal or shell that doesn' support unicode python only lib fl ff