Uncommon Uses of Common Python Standard Library Functions

A fresh guide gives old Python friends a second look—turns out, tools like **itertools.groupby**, **zip**, **bisect**, and **heapq** aren’t just standard; they’re slick solutions to real problems. Think run-length encoding, matrix transposes, or fast, sorted inserts without bringing in another dependency. **defaultdict** gets a shoutout for building nested data on the fly—because no one wants to write six lines to avoid a `KeyError`. And **string.Template** steps in where missing variables would otherwise break your templating flow.