= Utilities
[.readme-notice]
NOTE: This document is better viewed at https://docs.openzeppelin.com/contracts/api/utils
Miscellaneous contracts and libraries containing utility functions you can use to improve security, work with new data types, or safely use low-level primitives.
Security tools include:
* {Pausable}: provides a simple way to halt activity in your contracts (often in response to an external threat).
* {ReentrancyGuard}: protects you from https://blog.openzeppelin.com/reentrancy-after-istanbul/[reentrant calls].
The {Address}, {Arrays} and {Strings} libraries provide more operations related to these native data types, while {SafeCast} adds ways to safely convert between the different signed and unsigned numeric types.
For new data types:
* {Counters}: a simple way to get a counter that can only be incremented or decremented. Very useful for ID generation, counting contract activity, among others.
* {EnumerableMap}: like Solidity's https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/latest/types.html#mapping-types[`mapping`] type, but with key-value _enumeration_: this will let you know how many entries a mapping has, and iterate over them (which is not possible with `mapping`).
* {EnumerableSet}: like {EnumerableMap}, but for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_(abstract_data_type)[sets]. Can be used to store privileged accounts, issued IDs, etc.
[NOTE]
====
Because Solidity does not support generic types, {EnumerableMap} and {EnumerableSet} are specialized to a limited number of key-value types.
As of v3.0, {EnumerableMap} supports `uint256 -> address` (`UintToAddressMap`), and {EnumerableSet} supports `address` and `uint256` (`AddressSet` and `UintSet`).
====
Finally, {Create2} contains all necessary utilities to safely use the https://blog.openzeppelin.com/getting-the-most-out-of-create2/[`CREATE2` EVM opcode], without having to deal with low-level assembly.
== Contracts
{{Pausable}}
{{ReentrancyGuard}}
== Libraries
{{Address}}
{{Arrays}}
{{Counters}}
{{Create2}}
{{EnumerableMap}}
{{EnumerableSet}}
{{SafeCast}}
{{Strings}}
