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  <section id="binary-data-services">
<span id="binaryservices"></span><h1>Binary Data Services<a class="headerlink" href="#binary-data-services" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h1>
<p>The modules described in this chapter provide some basic services operations
for manipulation of binary data. Other operations on binary data, specifically
in relation to file formats and network protocols, are described in the
relevant sections.</p>
<p>Some libraries described under <a class="reference internal" href="text.html#textservices"><span class="std std-ref">Text Processing Services</span></a> also work with either
ASCII-compatible binary formats (for example, <a class="reference internal" href="re.html#module-re" title="re: Regular expression operations."><code class="xref py py-mod docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">re</span></code></a>) or all binary data
(for example, <a class="reference internal" href="difflib.html#module-difflib" title="difflib: Helpers for computing differences between objects."><code class="xref py py-mod docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">difflib</span></code></a>).</p>
<p>In addition, see the documentation for Python’s built-in binary data types in
<a class="reference internal" href="stdtypes.html#binaryseq"><span class="std std-ref">Binary Sequence Types — bytes, bytearray, memoryview</span></a>.</p>
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