The standard library contains many hidden gems that are not widely used, either because they are not publicized enough or because they are deep in a module that programmers haven't had cause to study or use. This presentation covers 8-10 selected topics of this nature in about 25 minutes (leaving time for a couple of questions). Demonstration code is included for every item.

Possible tips include, in no particular order:

• Using hmac to verify pickled data before unpacking it.
• Using uuid4 to generate session tokens.
• Regular expression look-ahead/behind matches.
• pdb startup files
• Reading files with mmap
• Using csv dialects
• The robotparser module
• The rlcompleter module
• Using locale to format numbers and currency
• The cgitb module
• pkgutil.getdata
• contextlib.contextmanager
• The cmd module
• The fileinput module