Fluent Python

Luciano Ramalho

Fluent Python

By Luciano Ramalho

Copyright © 2015 Luciano Gama de Sousa Ramalho. All rights reserved.

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978-1-491-94600-8

[LSI]

Dedication

Para Marta, com todo o meu amor.

Preface

Here’s the plan: when someone uses a feature you don’t understand, simply shoot them. This is easier than learning something new, and before too long the only living coders will be writing in an easily understood, tiny subset of Python 0.9.6 <wink>.¹

Tim Peters, Legendary core developer and author of The Zen of Python

“Python is an easy to learn, powerful programming language.” Those are the first words of the official Python Tutorial. That is true, but there is a catch: because the language is easy to learn and put to use, many practicing Python programmers leverage only a fraction of its powerful features.

An experienced programmer may start writing useful Python code in a matter of hours. As the first productive hours become weeks and months, a lot of developers go on writing Python code with a very strong accent carried from languages learned before. Even if Python is your first language, often in academia and in introductory books it is presented while carefully avoiding language-specific features.

As a teacher introducing Python to programmers experienced in other languages, I see another problem that this book tries to address: we only miss stuff we know about. Coming from another language, anyone may guess that Python supports regular expressions, and look that up in the docs. But if you’ve never seen tuple unpacking or descriptors before, you will probably not search for them, and may end up not using those features just because they are specific to Python.

This book is not an A-to-Z exhaustive reference of Python. Its emphasis is on the language features that are either unique to Python or not found in many other popular languages. This is also mostly a book about the core language and some of its libraries. I will rarely talk about packages that are not in the standard library, even though the Python package index now lists more than 60,000 libraries and many of them are incredibly useful.

Who This Book Is For

This book was written for practicing Python programmers who want to become proficient in Python 3. If you know Python 2 but are willing to migrate to Python 3.4 or later, you should be fine. At the time of this writing, the majority of professional Python programmers are using Python 2, so I took special care to highlight Python 3 features that may be new to that audience.

However, Fluent Python is about making the most of Python 3.4, and I do not spell out the fixes needed to make the code work in earlier versions. Most examples should run in Python 2.7 with little or no changes, but in some cases, backporting would require significant rewriting.

Having said that, I believe this book may be useful even if you must stick with Python 2.7, because the core concepts are still the same. Python 3 is not a new language, and most differences can be learned in an afternoon. What’s New in Python 3.0 is a good starting point. Of course, there have been changes since Python 3.0 was released in 2009, but none as important as those in 3.0.

If you are not sure whether you know enough Python to follow along, review the topics of the official Python Tutorial. Topics covered in the tutorial will not be explained here, except for some features that are new in Python 3.

Who This Book Is Not For

If you are just learning Python, this book is going to be hard to follow. Not only that, if you read it too early in your Python journey, it may give you the impression that every Python script should leverage special methods and metaprogramming tricks. Premature abstraction is as bad as premature optimization.

How This Book Is Organized

The core audience for this book should not have trouble jumping directly to any chapter in this book. However, each of the six parts forms a book within the book. I conceived the chapters within each part to be read in sequence.

I tried to emphasize using what is available before discussing how to build your own. For example, in Part II, Chapter 2 covers sequence types that are ready to use, including some that don’t get a lot of attention, like collections.deque. Building user-defined sequences is only addressed in Part IV, where we also see how to leverage the abstract base classes (ABCs) from collections.abc. Creating your own ABCs is discussed even later in Part IV, because I believe it’s important to be comfortable using an ABC before writing your own.

This approach has a few advantages. First, knowing what is ready to use can save you from reinventing the wheel. We use existing collection classes more often than we implement our own, and we can give more attention to the advanced usage of available tools by deferring the discussion on how to create new ones. We are also more likely to inherit from existing ABCs than to create a new ABC from scratch. And finally, I believe it is easier to understand the abstractions after you’ve seen them in action.

The downside of this strategy are the forward references scattered throughout the chapters. I hope these will be easier to tolerate now that you know why I chose this path.

Here are the main topics in each part of the book:

Part I, Prologue

A single chapter about the Python data model explaining how the special methods (e.g., __repr__) are the key to the consistent behavior of objects of all types—in a language that is admired for its consistency. Understanding various facets of the data model is the subject of most of the rest of the book, but Chapter 1 provides a high-level overview.

Part II, Data Structures

The chapters in this part cover the use of collection types: sequences, mappings, and sets, as well as the str versus bytes split—the cause of much celebration among Python 3 users and much pain for Python 2 users who have not yet migrated their code bases. The main goals are to recall what is already available and to explain some behavior that is sometimes surprising, like the reordering of dict keys when we are not looking, or the caveats of locale-dependent Unicode string sorting. To achieve these goals, the coverage is sometimes high level and wide (e.g., when many variations of sequences and mappings are presented) and sometimes deep (e.g., when we dive into the hash tables underneath the dict and set types).

Part III, Functions as Objects

Here we talk about functions as first-class objects in the language: what that means, how it affects some popular design patterns, and how to implement function decorators by leveraging closures. Also covered here is the general concept of callables in Python, function attributes, introspection, parameter annotations, and the new nonlocal declaration in Python 3.

Part IV, Object-Oriented Idioms

Now the focus is on building classes. In Part II, the class declaration appears in few examples; Part IV presents many classes. Like any object-oriented (OO) language, Python has its particular set of features that may or may not be present in the language in which you and I learned class-based programming. The chapters explain how references work, what mutability really means, the lifecycle of instances, how to build your own collections and ABCs, how to cope with multiple inheritance, and how to implement operator overloading—when that makes sense.

Part V, Control Flow

Covered in this part are the language constructs and libraries that go beyond sequential control flow with conditionals, loops, and subroutines. We start with generators, then visit context managers and coroutines, including the challenging but powerful new yield from syntax. Part V closes with a high-level introduction to modern concurrency in Python with collections.futures (using threads and processes under the covers with the help of futures) and doing event-oriented I/O with asyncio (leveraging futures on top of coroutines and yield from).

Part VI, Metaprogramming

This part starts with a review of techniques for building classes with attributes created dynamically to handle semi-structured data such as JSON datasets. Next, we cover the familiar properties mechanism, before diving into how object attribute access works at a lower level in Python using descriptors. The relationship between functions, methods, and descriptors is explained. Throughout Part VI, the step-by-step implementation of a field validation library uncovers subtle issues that lead to the use of the advanced tools of the final chapter: class decorators and metaclasses.

Hands-On Approach

Often we’ll use the interactive Python console to explore the language and libraries. I feel it is important to emphasize the power of this learning tool, particularly for those readers who’ve had more experience with static, compiled languages that don’t provide a read-eval-print loop (REPL).

One of the standard Python testing packages, doctest, works by simulating console sessions and verifying that the expressions evaluate to the responses shown. I used doctest to check most of the code in this book, including the console listings. You don’t need to use or even know about doctest to follow along: the key feature of doctests is that they look like transcripts of interactive Python console sessions, so you can easily try out the demonstrations yourself.

Sometimes I will explain what we want to accomplish by showing a doctest before the code that makes it pass. Firmly establishing what is to be done before thinking about how to do it helps focus our coding effort. Writing tests first is the basis of test driven development (TDD) and I’ve also found it helpful when teaching. If you are unfamiliar with doctest, take a look at its documentation and this book’s source code repository. You’ll find that you can verify the correctness of most of the code in the book by typing python3 -m doctest example_script.py in the command shell of your OS.

Hardware Used for Timings

The book has some simple benchmarks and timings. Those tests were performed on one or the other laptop I used to write the book: a 2011 MacBook Pro 13” with a 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a spinning hard disk, and a 2014 MacBook Air 13” with a 1.4 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU, 4GB of RAM, and a solid-state disk. The MacBook Air has a slower CPU and less RAM, but its RAM is faster (1600 versus 1333 MHz) and the SSD is much faster than the HD. In daily usage, I can’t tell which machine is faster.

Soapbox: My Personal Perspective

I have been using, teaching, and debating Python since 1998, and I enjoy studying and comparing programming languages, their design, and the theory behind them. At the end of some chapters, I have added “Soapbox” sidebars with my own perspective about Python and other languages. Feel free to skip these if you are not into such discussions. Their content is completely optional.

Python Jargon

I wanted this to be a book not only about Python but also about the culture around it. Over more than 20 years of communications, the Python community has developed its own particular lingo and acronyms. At the end of this book, Python Jargon contains a list of terms that have special meaning among Pythonistas.

Python Version Covered

I tested all the code in the book using Python 3.4—that is, CPython 3.4, the most popular Python implementation written in C. There is only one exception: “The New @ Infix Operator in Python 3.5” shows the @ operator, which is only supported by Python 3.5.

Almost all code in the book should work with any Python 3.x–compatible interpreter, including PyPy3 2.4.0, which is compatible with Python 3.2.5. The notable exceptions are the examples using yield from and asyncio, which are only available in Python 3.3 or later.

Most code should also work with Python 2.7 with minor changes, except the Unicode-related examples in Chapter 4, and the exceptions already noted for Python 3 versions earlier than 3.3.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.

Note that when a line break falls within a constant_width term, a hyphen is not added—it could be misunderstood as part of the term.

Constant width bold

Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.

Tip

This element signifies a tip or suggestion.

Note

This element signifies a general note.

Warning

This element indicates a warning or caution.

Using Code Examples

Every script and most code snippets that appear in the book are available in the Fluent Python code repository on GitHub.

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Acknowledgments

The Bauhaus chess set by Josef Hartwig is an example of excellent design: beautiful, simple, and clear. Guido van Rossum, son of an architect and brother of a master font designer, created a masterpiece of language design. I love teaching Python because it is beautiful, simple, and clear.

Alex Martelli and Anna Ravenscroft were the first people to see the outline of this book and encouraged me to submit it to O’Reilly for publication. Their books taught me idiomatic Python and are models of clarity, accuracy, and depth in technical writing. Alex’s 5,000+ Stack Overflow posts are a fountain of insights about the language and its proper use.

Martelli and Ravenscroft were also technical reviewers of this book, along with Lennart Regebro and Leonardo Rochael. Everyone in this outstanding technical review team has at least 15 years of Python experience, with many contributions to high-impact Python projects in close contact with other developers in the community. Together they sent me hundreds of corrections, suggestions, questions, and opinions, adding tremendous value to the book. Victor Stinner kindly reviewed Chapter 18, bringing his expertise as an asyncio maintainer to the technical review team. It was a great privilege and a pleasure to collaborate with them over these past several months.

Editor Meghan Blanchette was an outstanding mentor, helping me improve the organization and flow of the book, letting me know when it was boring, and keeping me from delaying even more. Brian MacDonald edited chapters in Part III while Meghan was away. I enjoyed working with them, and with everyone I’ve contacted at O’Reilly, including the Atlas development and support team (Atlas is the O’Reilly book publishing platform, which I was fortunate to use to write this book).

Mario Domenech Goulart provided numerous, detailed suggestions starting with the first Early Release. I also received valuable feedback from Dave Pawson, Elias Dorneles, Leonardo Alexandre Ferreira Leite, Bruce Eckel, J. S. Bueno, Rafael Gonçalves, Alex Chiaranda, Guto Maia, Lucas Vido, and Lucas Brunialti.

Over the years, a number of people urged me to become an author, but the most persuasive were Rubens Prates, Aurelio Jargas, Rudá Moura, and Rubens Altimari. Mauricio Bussab opened many doors for me, including my first real shot at writing a book. Renzo Nuccitelli supported this writing project all the way, even if that meant a slow start for our partnership at python.pro.br.

The wonderful Brazilian Python community is knowledgeable, generous, and fun. The Python Brasil group has thousands of people and our national conferences bring together hundreds, but the most influential in my journey as a Pythonista were Leonardo Rochael, Adriano Petrich, Daniel Vainsencher, Rodrigo RBP Pimentel, Bruno Gola, Leonardo Santagada, Jean Ferri, Rodrigo Senra, J. S. Bueno, David Kwast, Luiz Irber, Osvaldo Santana, Fernando Masanori, Henrique Bastos, Gustavo Niemayer, Pedro Werneck, Gustavo Barbieri, Lalo Martins, Danilo Bellini, and Pedro Kroger.

Dorneles Tremea was a great friend (incredibly generous with his time and knowledge), an amazing hacker, and the most inspiring leader of the Brazilian Python Association. He left us too early.

My students over the years taught me a lot through their questions, insights, feedback, and creative solutions to problems. Érico Andrei and Simples Consultoria made it possible for me to focus on being a Python teacher for the first time.

Martijn Faassen was my Grok mentor and shared invaluable insights with me about Python and Neanderthals. His work and that of Paul Everitt, Chris McDonough, Tres Seaver, Jim Fulton, Shane Hathaway, Lennart Regebro, Alan Runyan, Alexander Limi, Martijn Pieters, Godefroid Chapelle, and others from the Zope, Plone, and Pyramid planets have been decisive in my career. Thanks to Zope and surfing the first web wave, I was able to start making a living with Python in 1998. José Octavio Castro Neves was my partner in the first Python-centric software house in Brazil.

I have too many gurus in the wider Python community to list them all, but besides those already mentioned, I am indebted to Steve Holden, Raymond Hettinger, A.M. Kuchling, David Beazley, Fredrik Lundh, Doug Hellmann, Nick Coghlan, Mark Pilgrim, Martijn Pieters, Bruce Eckel, Michele Simionato, Wesley Chun, Brandon Craig Rhodes, Philip Guo, Daniel Greenfeld, Audrey Roy, and Brett Slatkin for teaching me new and better ways to teach Python.

Most of these pages were written in my home office and in two labs: CoffeeLab and Garoa Hacker Clube. CoffeeLab is the caffeine-geek headquarters in Vila Madalena, São Paulo, Brazil. Garoa Hacker Clube is a hackerspace open to all: a community lab where anyone can freely try out new ideas.

The Garoa community provided inspiration, infrastructure, and slack. I think Aleph would enjoy this book.

My mother, Maria Lucia, and my father, Jairo, always supported me in every way. I wish he was here to see the book; I am glad I can share it with her.

My wife, Marta Mello, endured 15 months of a husband who was always working, but remained supportive and coached me through some critical moments in the project when I feared I might drop out of the marathon.

Thank you all, for everything.

¹ Message to the comp.lang.python Usenet group, Dec. 23, 2002: “Acrimony in c.l.p.”

Part I. Prologue

Chapter 1. The Python Data Model

Guido’s sense of the aesthetics of language design is amazing. I’ve met many fine language designers who could build theoretically beautiful languages that no one would ever use, but Guido is one of those rare people who can build a language that is just slightly less theoretically beautiful but thereby is a joy to write programs in.¹

Jim Hugunin, Creator of Jython, cocreator of AspectJ, architect of the .Net DLR

One of the best qualities of Python is its consistency. After working with Python for a while, you are able to start making informed, correct guesses about features that are new to you.

However, if you learned another object-oriented language before Python, you may have found it strange to use len(collection) instead of collection.len(). This apparent oddity is the tip of an iceberg that, when properly understood, is the key to everything we call Pythonic. The iceberg is called the Python data model, and it describes the API that you can use to make your own objects play well with the most idiomatic language features.

You can think of the data model as a description of Python as a framework. It formalizes the interfaces of the building blocks of the language itself, such as sequences, iterators, functions, classes, context managers, and so on.

While coding with any framework, you spend a lot of time implementing methods that are called by the framework. The same happens when you leverage the Python data model. The Python interpreter invokes special methods to perform basic object operations, often triggered by special syntax. The special method names are always written with leading and trailing double underscores (i.e., __getitem__). For example, the syntax obj[key] is supported by the __getitem__ special method. In order to evaluate my_collection[key], the interpreter calls my_collection.__getitem__(key).

The special method names allow your objects to implement, support, and interact with basic language constructs such as:

Iteration

Collections

Attribute access

Operator overloading

Function and method invocation

Object creation and destruction

String representation and formatting

Managed contexts (i.e., with blocks)

Magic and Dunder

The term magic method is slang for special method, but when talking about a specific method like __getitem__, some Python developers take the shortcut of saying “under-under-getitem” which is ambiguous, because the syntax __x has another special meaning.² Being precise and pronouncing “under-under-getitem-under-under” is tiresome, so I follow the lead of author and teacher Steve Holden and say “dunder-getitem.” All experienced Pythonistas understand that shortcut. As a result, the special methods are also known as dunder methods.³

A Pythonic Card Deck

The following is a very simple example, but it demonstrates the power of implementing just two special methods, __getitem__ and __len__.

Example 1-1 is a class to represent a deck of playing cards.

Example 1-1. A deck as a sequence of cards

import collections

Card = collections.namedtuple('Card', ['rank', 'suit'])

class FrenchDeck:
    ranks = [str(n) for n in range(2, 11)] + list('JQKA')
    suits = 'spades diamonds clubs hearts'.split()

    def __init__(self):
        self._cards = [Card(rank, suit) for suit in self.suits
                                        for rank in self.ranks]

    def __len__(self):
        return len(self._cards)

    def __getitem__(self, position):
        return self._cards[position]

The first thing to note is the use of collections.namedtuple to construct a simple class to represent individual cards. Since Python 2.6, namedtuple can be used to build classes of objects that are just bundles of attributes with no custom methods, like a database record. In the example, we use it to provide a nice representation for the cards in the deck, as shown in the console session:

>>> beer_card = Card('7', 'diamonds')
>>> beer_card
Card(rank='7', suit='diamonds')

But the point of this example is the FrenchDeck class. It’s short, but it packs a punch. First, like any standard Python collection, a deck responds to the len() function by returning the number of cards in it:

>>> deck = FrenchDeck()
>>> len(deck)
52

Reading specific cards from the deck—say, the first or the last—should be as easy as deck[0] or deck[-1], and this is what the __getitem__ method provides:

>>> deck[0]
Card(rank='2', suit='spades')
>>> deck[-1]
Card(rank='A', suit='hearts')

Should we create a method to pick a random card? No need. Python already has a function to get a random item from a sequence: random.choice. We can just use it on a deck instance:

>>> from random import choice
>>> choice(deck)
Card(rank='3', suit='hearts')
>>> choice(deck)
Card(rank='K', suit='spades')
>>> choice(deck)
Card(rank='2', suit='clubs')

We’ve just seen two advantages of using special methods to leverage the Python data model:

The users of your classes don’t have to memorize arbitrary method names for standard operations (“How to get the number of items? Is it .size(), .length(), or what?”).

It’s easier to benefit from the rich Python standard library and avoid reinventing the wheel, like the random.choice function.

But it gets better.

Because our __getitem__ delegates to the [] operator of self._cards, our deck automatically supports slicing. Here’s how we look at the top three cards from a brand new deck, and then pick just the aces by starting on index 12 and skipping 13 cards at a time:

>>> deck[:3]
[Card(rank='2', suit='spades'), Card(rank='3', suit='spades'),
Card(rank='4', suit='spades')]
>>> deck[12::13]
[Card(rank='A', suit='spades'), Card(rank='A', suit='diamonds'),
Card(rank='A', suit='clubs'), Card(rank='A', suit='hearts')]

Just by implementing the __getitem__ special method, our deck is also iterable:

>>> for card in deck:  # doctest: +ELLIPSIS
...   print(card)
Card(rank='2', suit='spades')
Card(rank='3', suit='spades')
Card(rank='4', suit='spades')
...

The deck can also be iterated in reverse:

>>> for card in reversed(deck):  # doctest: +ELLIPSIS
...   print(card)
Card(rank='A', suit='hearts')
Card(rank='K', suit='hearts')
Card(rank='Q', suit='hearts')
...

Ellipsis in doctests

Whenever possible, the Python console listings in this book were extracted from doctests to ensure accuracy. When the output was too long, the elided part is marked by an ellipsis (...) like in the last line in the preceding code. In such cases, we used the # doctest: +ELLIPSIS directive to make the doctest pass. If you are trying these examples in the interactive console, you may omit the doctest directives altogether.

Iteration is often implicit. If a collection has no __contains__ method, the in operator does a sequential scan. Case in point: in works with our FrenchDeck class because it is iterable. Check it out:

>>> Card('Q', 'hearts') in deck
True
>>> Card('7', 'beasts') in deck
False

How about sorting? A common system of ranking cards is by rank (with aces being highest), then by suit in the order of spades (highest), then hearts, diamonds, and clubs (lowest). Here is a function that ranks cards by that rule, returning 0 for the 2 of clubs and 51 for the ace of spades:

suit_values = dict(spades=3, hearts=2, diamonds=1, clubs=0)

def spades_high(card):
    rank_value = FrenchDeck.ranks.index(card.rank)
    return rank_value * len(suit_values) + suit_values[card.suit]

Given spades_high, we can now list our deck in order of increasing rank:

>>> for card in sorted(deck, key=spades_high):  # doctest: +ELLIPSIS
...      print(card)
Card(rank='2', suit='clubs')
Card(rank='2', suit='diamonds')
Card(rank='2', suit='hearts')
... (46 cards ommitted)
Card(rank='A', suit='diamonds')
Card(rank='A', suit='hearts')
Card(rank='A', suit='spades')

Although FrenchDeck implicitly inherits from object,⁴ its functionality is not inherited, but comes from leveraging the data model and composition. By implementing the special methods __len__ and __getitem__, our FrenchDeck behaves like a standard Python sequence, allowing it to benefit from core language features (e.g., iteration and slicing) and from the standard library, as shown by the examples using random.choice, reversed, and sorted. Thanks to composition, the __len__ and __getitem__ implementations can hand off all the work to a list object, self._cards.

How About Shuffling?

As implemented so far, a FrenchDeck cannot be shuffled, because it is immutable: the cards and their positions cannot be changed, except by violating encapsulation and handling the _cards attribute directly. In Chapter 11, that will be fixed by adding a one-line __setitem__ method.

How Special Methods Are Used

The first thing to know about special methods is that they are meant to be called by the Python interpreter, and not by you. You don’t write my_object.__len__(). You write len(my_object) and, if my_object is an instance of a user-defined class, then Python calls the __len__ instance method you implemented.

But for built-in types like list, str, bytearray, and so on, the interpreter takes a shortcut: the CPython implementation of len() actually returns the value of the ob_size field in the PyVarObject C struct that represents any variable-sized built-in object in memory. This is much faster than calling a method.

More often than not, the special method call is implicit. For example, the statement for i in x: actually causes the invocation of iter(x), which in turn may call x.__iter__() if that is available.

Normally, your code should not have many direct calls to special methods. Unless you are doing a lot of metaprogramming, you should be implementing special methods more often than invoking them explicitly. The only special method that is frequently called by user code directly is __init__, to invoke the initializer of the superclass in your own __init__ implementation.

If you need to invoke a special method, it is usually better to call the related built-in function (e.g., len, iter, str, etc). These built-ins call the corresponding special method, but often provide other services and—for built-in types—are faster than method calls. See, for example, “A Closer Look at the iter Function” in Chapter 14.

Avoid creating arbitrary, custom attributes with the __foo__ syntax because such names may acquire special meanings in the future, even if they are unused today.

Emulating Numeric Types

Several special methods allow user objects to respond to operators such as +. We will cover that in more detail in Chapter 13, but here our goal is to further illustrate the use of special methods through another simple example.

We will implement a class to represent two-dimensional vectors—that is Euclidean vectors like those used in math and physics (see Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. Example of two-dimensional vector addition; Vector(2, 4) + Vector(2, 1) results in Vector(4, 5).

Tip

The built-in complex type can be used to represent two-dimensional vectors, but our class can be extended to represent n-dimensional vectors. We will do that in Chapter 14.

We will start by designing the API for such a class by writing a simulated console session that we can use later as a doctest. The following snippet tests the vector addition pictured in Figure 1-1:

>>> v1 = Vector(2, 4)
>>> v2 = Vector(2, 1)
>>> v1 + v2
Vector(4, 5)

Note how the + operator produces a Vector result, which is displayed in a friendly manner in the console.

The abs built-in function returns the absolute value of integers and floats, and the magnitude of complex numbers, so to be consistent, our API also uses abs to calculate the magnitude of a vector:

>>> v = Vector(3, 4)
>>> abs(v)
5.0

We can also implement the * operator to perform scalar multiplication (i.e., multiplying a vector by a number to produce a new vector with the same direction and a multiplied magnitude):

>>> v * 3
Vector(9, 12)
>>> abs(v * 3)
15.0

Example 1-2 is a Vector class implementing the operations just described, through the use of the special methods __repr__, __abs__, __add__ and __mul__.

Example 1-2. A simple two-dimensional vector class

from math import hypot

class Vector:

    def __init__(self, x=0, y=0):
        self.x = x
        self.y = y

    def __repr__(self):
        return 'Vector(%r, %r)' % (self.x, self.y)

    def __abs__(self):
        return hypot(self.x, self.y)

    def __bool__(self):
        return bool(abs(self))

    def __add__(self, other):
        x = self.x + other.x
        y = self.y + other.y
        return Vector(x, y)

    def __mul__(self, scalar):
        return Vector(self.x * scalar, self.y * scalar)

Note that although we implemented four special methods (apart from __init__), none of them is directly called within the class or in the typical usage of the class illustrated by the console listings. As mentioned before, the Python interpreter is the only frequent caller of most special methods. In the following sections, we discuss the code for each special method.

String Representation

The __repr__ special method is called by the repr built-in to get the string representation of the object for inspection. If we did not implement __repr__, vector instances would be shown in the console like <Vector object at 0x10e100070>.

The interactive console and debugger call repr on the results of the expressions evaluated, as does the %r placeholder in classic formatting with the % operator, and the !r conversion field in the new Format String Syntax used in the str.format method.

Note

Speaking of the % operator and the str.format method, you will notice I use both in this book, as does the Python community at large. I am increasingly favoring the more powerful str.format, but I am aware many Pythonistas prefer the simpler %, so we’ll probably see both in Python source code for the foreseeable future.

Note that in our __repr__ implementation, we used %r to obtain the standard representation of the attributes to be displayed. This is good practice, because it shows the crucial difference between Vector(1, 2) and Vector('1', '2')—the latter would not work in the context of this example, because the constructor’s arguments must be numbers, not str.

The string returned by __repr__ should be unambiguous and, if possible, match the source code necessary to re-create the object being represented. That is why our chosen representation looks like calling the constructor of the class (e.g., Vector(3, 4)).

Contrast __repr__ with __str__, which is called by the str() constructor and implicitly used by the print function. __str__ should return a string suitable for display to end users.

If you only implement one of these special methods, choose __repr__, because when no custom __str__ is available, Python will call __repr__ as a fallback.

Tip

“Difference between __str__ and __repr__ in Python” is a Stack Overflow question with excellent contributions from Pythonistas Alex Martelli and Martijn Pieters.

Arithmetic Operators

Example 1-2 implements two operators: + and *, to show basic usage of __add__ and __mul__. Note that in both cases, the methods create and return a new instance of Vector, and do not modify either operand—self or other are merely read. This is the expected behavior of infix operators: to create new objects and not touch their operands. I will have a lot more to say about that in Chapter 13.

Warning

As implemented, Example 1-2 allows multiplying a Vector by a number, but not a number by a Vector, which violates the commutative property of multiplication. We will fix that with the special method __rmul__ in Chapter 13.

Boolean Value of a Custom Type

Although Python has a bool type, it accepts any object in a boolean context, such as the expression controlling an if or while statement, or as operands to and, or, and not. To determine whether a value x is truthy or falsy, Python applies bool(x), which always returns True or False.

By default, instances of user-defined classes are considered truthy, unless either __bool__ or __len__ is implemented. Basically, bool(x) calls x.__bool__() and uses the result. If __bool__ is not implemented, Python tries to invoke x.__len__(), and if that returns zero, bool returns False. Otherwise bool returns True.

Our implementation of __bool__ is conceptually simple: it returns False if the magnitude of the vector is zero, True otherwise. We convert the magnitude to a Boolean using bool(abs(self)) because __bool__ is expected to return a boolean.

Note how the special method __bool__ allows your objects to be consistent with the truth value testing rules defined in the “Built-in Types” chapter of The Python Standard Library documentation.

Note

A faster implementation of Vector.__bool__ is this:

    def __bool__(self):
        return bool(self.x or self.y)

This is harder to read, but avoids the trip through abs, __abs__, the squares, and square root. The explicit conversion to bool is needed because __bool__ must return a boolean and or returns either operand as is: x or y evaluates to x if that is truthy, otherwise the result is y, whatever that is.

Overview of Special Methods

The “Data Model” chapter of The Python Language Reference lists 83 special method names, 47 of which are used to implement arithmetic, bitwise, and comparison operators.

As an overview of what is available, see Tables 1-1 and 1-2.

Note

The grouping shown in the following tables is not exactly the same as in the official documentation.

Table 1-1. Special method names (operators excluded)

Category
Method names

String/bytes representation

__repr__, __str__, __format__, __bytes__

Conversion to number

__abs__, __bool__, __complex__, __int__, __float__, __hash__, __index__

Emulating collections

__len__, __getitem__, __setitem__, __delitem__, __contains__

Iteration

__iter__, __reversed__, __next__

Emulating callables

__call__

Context management

__enter__, __exit__

Instance creation and destruction

__new__, __init__, __del__

Attribute management

__getattr__, __getattribute__, __setattr__, __delattr__, __dir__

Attribute descriptors

__get__, __set__, __delete__

Class services

__prepare__, __instancecheck__, __subclasscheck__

Table 1-2. Special method names for operators

Category
Method names and related operators

Unary numeric operators

__neg__ -, __pos__ +, __abs__ abs()

Rich comparison operators

__lt__ <, __le__ <=, __eq__ ==, __ne__ !=, __gt__ >, __ge__ >=

Arithmetic operators

__add__ +, __sub__ -, __mul__ *, __truediv__ /, __floordiv__ //, __mod__ %, __divmod__ divmod() , __pow__ ** or pow(), __round__ round()

Reversed arithmetic operators

__radd__, __rsub__, __rmul__, __rtruediv__, __rfloordiv__, __rmod__, __rdivmod__, __rpow__

Augmented assignment arithmetic operators

__iadd__, __isub__, __imul__, __itruediv__, __ifloordiv__, __imod__, __ipow__

Bitwise operators

__invert__ ~, __lshift__ <<, __rshift__ >>, __and__ &, __or__ |, __xor__ ^

Reversed bitwise operators

__rlshift__, __rrshift__, __rand__, __rxor__, __ror__

Augmented assignment bitwise operators

__ilshift__, __irshift__, __iand__, __ixor__, __ior__

Tip

The reversed operators are fallbacks used when operands are swapped (b * a instead of a * b), while augmented assignments are shortcuts combining an infix operator with variable assignment (a = a * b becomes a *= b). Chapter 13 explains both reversed operators and augmented assignment in detail.

Why len Is Not a Method

I asked this question to core developer Raymond Hettinger in 2013 and the key to his answer was a quote from The Zen of Python: “practicality beats purity.” In “How Special Methods Are Used”, I described how len(x) runs very fast when x is an instance of a built-in type. No method is called for the built-in objects of CPython: the length is simply read from a field in a C struct. Getting the number of items in a collection is a common operation and must work efficiently for such basic and diverse types as str, list, memoryview, and so on.

In other words, len is not called as a method because it gets special treatment as part of the Python data model, just like abs. But thanks to the special method __len__, you can also make len work with your own custom objects. This is a fair compromise between the need for efficient built-in objects and the consistency of the language. Also from The Zen of Python: “Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.”

Note

If you think of abs and len as unary operators, you may be more inclined to forgive their functional look-and-feel, as opposed to the method call syntax one might expect in an OO language. In fact, the ABC language—a direct ancestor of Python that pioneered many of its features—had an # operator that was the equivalent of len (you’d write #s). When used as an infix operator, written x#s, it counted the occurrences of x in s, which in Python you get as s.count(x), for any sequence s.

Chapter Summary

By implementing special methods, your objects can behave like the built-in types, enabling the expressive coding style the community considers Pythonic.

A basic requirement for a Python object is to provide usable string representations of itself, one used for debugging and logging, another for presentation to end users. That is why the special methods __repr__ and __str__ exist in the data model.

Emulating sequences, as shown with the FrenchDeck example, is one of the most widely used applications of the special methods. Making the most of sequence types is the subject of Chapter 2, and implementing your own sequence will be covered in Chapter 10 when we create a multidimensional extension of the Vector class.

Thanks to operator overloading, Python offers a rich selection of numeric types, from the built-ins to decimal.Decimal and fractions.Fraction, all supporting infix arithmetic operators. Implementing operators, including reversed operators and augmented assignment, will be shown in Chapter 13 via enhancements of the Vector example.

The use and implementation of the majority of the remaining special methods of the Python data model are covered throughout this book.

Further Reading

The “Data Model” chapter of The Python Language Reference is the canonical source for the subject of this chapter and much of this book.

Python in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O’Reilly) by Alex Martelli has excellent coverage of the data model. As I write this, the most recent edition of the Nutshell book is from 2006 and focuses on Python 2.5, but there have been very few changes in the data model since then, and Martelli’s description of the mechanics of attribute access is the most authoritative I’ve seen apart from the actual C source code of CPython. Martelli is also a prolific contributor to Stack Overflow, with more than 5,000 answers posted. See his user profile at Stack Overflow.

David Beazley has two books covering the data model in detail in the context of Python 3: Python Essential Reference, 4th Edition (Addison-Wesley Professional), and Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition (O’Reilly), coauthored with Brian K. Jones.

The Art of the Metaobject Protocol (AMOP, MIT Press) by Gregor Kiczales, Jim des Rivieres, and Daniel G. Bobrow explains the concept of a metaobject protocol (MOP), of which the Python data model is one example.

Soapbox

Data Model or Object Model?

What the Python documentation calls the “Python data model,” most authors would say is the “Python object model.” Alex Martelli’s Python in a Nutshell 2E, and David Beazley’s Python Essential Reference 4E are the best books covering the “Python data model,” but they always refer to it as the “object model.” On Wikipedia, the first definition of object model is “The properties of objects in general in a specific computer programming language.” This is what the “Python data model” is about. In this book, I will use “data model” because the documentation favors that term when referring to the Python object model, and because it is the title of the chapter of The Python Language Reference most relevant to our discussions.

Magic Methods

The Ruby community calls their equivalent of the special methods magic methods. Many in the Python community adopt that term as well. I believe the special methods are actually the opposite of magic. Python and Ruby are the same in this regard: both empower their users with a rich metaobject protocol that is not magic, but enables users to leverage the same tools available to core developers.

In contrast, consider JavaScript. Objects in that language have features that are magic, in the sense that you cannot emulate them in your own user-defined objects. For example, before JavaScript 1.8.5, you could not define read-only attributes in your JavaScript objects, but some built-in objects always had read-only attributes. In JavaScript, read-only attributes were “magic,” requiring supernatural powers that a user of the language did not have until ECMAScript 5.1 came out in 2009. The metaobject protocol of JavaScript is evolving, but historically it has been more limited than those of Python and Ruby.

Metaobjects

The Art of the Metaobject Protocol (AMOP) is my favorite computer book title. Less subjectively, the term metaobject protocol is useful to think about the Python data model and similar features in other languages. The metaobject part refers to the objects that are the building blocks of the language itself. In this context, protocol is a synonym of interface. So a metaobject protocol is a fancy synonym for object model: an API for core language constructs.

A rich metaobject protocol enables extending a language to support new programming paradigms. Gregor Kiczales, the first author of the AMOP book, later became a pioneer in aspect-oriented programming and the initial author of AspectJ, an extension of Java implementing that paradigm. Aspect-oriented programming is much easier to implement in a dynamic language like Python, and several frameworks do it, but the most important is zope.interface, which is briefly discussed in “Further Reading” of Chapter 11.

¹ Story of Jython, written as a Foreword to Jython Essentials (O’Reilly, 2002), by Samuele Pedroni and Noel Rappin.

² See “Private and “Protected” Attributes in Python”.

³ I personally first heard “dunder” from Steve Holden. Wikipedia credits Mark Johnson and Tim Hochberg for the first written records of “dunder” in responses to the question “How do you pronounce __ (double underscore)?” in the python-list on September 26, 2002: Johnson’s message; Hochberg’s (11 minutes later).

⁴ In Python 2, you’d have to be explicit and write FrenchDeck(object), but that’s the default in Python 3.

Part II. Data Structures

Chapter 2. An Array of Sequences

As you may have noticed, several of the operations mentioned work equally for texts, lists and tables. Texts, lists and tables together are called trains. […] The FOR command also works generically on trains.¹

Geurts, Meertens, and Pemberton, ABC Programmer’s Handbook

Before creating Python, Guido was a contributor to the ABC language—a 10-year research project to design a programming environment for beginners. ABC introduced many ideas we now consider “Pythonic”: generic operations on sequences, built-in tuple and mapping types, structure by indentation, strong typing without variable declarations, and more. It’s no accident that Python is so user-friendly.

Python inherited from ABC the uniform handling of sequences. Strings, lists, byte sequences, arrays, XML elements, and database results share a rich set of common operations including iteration, slicing, sorting, and concatenation.

Understanding the variety of sequences available in Python saves us from reinventing the wheel, and their common interface inspires us to create APIs that properly support and leverage existing and future sequence types.

Most of the discussion in this chapter applies to sequences in general, from the familiar list to the str and bytes types that are new in Python 3. Specific topics on lists, tuples, arrays, and queues are also covered here, but the focus on Unicode strings and byte sequences is deferred to Chapter 4. Also, the idea here is to cover sequence types that are ready to use. Creating your own sequence types is the subject of Chapter 10.

Overview of Built-In Sequences

The standard library offers a rich selection of sequence types implemented in C:

Container sequences

list, tuple, and collections.deque can hold items of different types.

Flat sequences

str, bytes, bytearray, memoryview, and array.array hold items of one type.

Container sequences hold references to the objects they contain, which may be of any type, while flat sequences physically store the value of each item within its own memory space, and not as distinct objects. Thus, flat sequences are more compact, but they are limited to holding primitive values like characters, bytes, and numbers.

Another way of grouping sequence types is by mutability:

Mutable sequences

list, bytearray, array.array, collections.deque, and memoryview

Immutable sequences

tuple, str, and bytes

Figure 2-1 helps visualize how mutable sequences differ from immutable ones, while also inheriting several methods from them. Note that the built-in concrete sequence types do not actually subclass the Sequence and MutableSequence abstract base classes (ABCs) depicted, but the ABCs are still useful as a formalization of what functionality to expect from a full-featured sequence type.

Figure 2-1. UML class diagram for some classes from collections.abc (superclasses are on the left; inheritance arrows point from subclasses to superclasses; names in italic are abstract classes and abstract methods)

Keeping in mind these common traits—mutable versus immutable; container versus flat—is helpful to extrapolate what you know about one sequence type to others.

The most fundamental sequence type is the list—mutable and mixed-type. I am sure you are comfortable handling them, so we’ll jump right into list comprehensions, a powerful way of building lists that is somewhat underused because the syntax may be unfamiliar. Mastering list comprehensions opens the door to generator expressions, which—among other uses—can produce elements to fill up sequences of any type. Both are the subject of the next section.

List Comprehensions and Generator Expressions

A quick way to build a sequence is using a list comprehension (if the target is a list) or a generator expression (for all other kinds of sequences). If you are not using these syntactic forms on a daily basis, I bet you are missing opportunities to write code that is more readable and often faster at the same time.

If you doubt my claim that these constructs are “more readable,” read on. I’ll try to convince you.

Tip

For brevity, many Python programmers refer to list comprehensions as listcomps, and generator expressions as genexps. I will use these words as well.

List Comprehensions and Readability

Here is a test: which do you find easier to read, Example 2-1 or Example 2-2?

Example 2-1. Build a list of Unicode codepoints from a string

>>> symbols = '$¢£¥€¤'
>>> codes = []
>>> for symbol in symbols:
...     codes.append(ord(symbol))
...
>>> codes
[36, 162, 163, 165, 8364, 164]

Example 2-2. Build a list of Unicode codepoints from a string, take two

>>> symbols = '$¢£¥€¤'
>>> codes = [ord(symbol) for symbol in symbols]
>>> codes
[36, 162, 163, 165, 8364, 164]

Anybody who knows a little bit of Python can read Example 2-1. However, after learning about listcomps, I find Example 2-2 more readable because its intent is explicit.

A for loop may be used to do lots of different things: scanning a sequence to count or pick items, computing aggregates (sums, averages), or any number of other processing tasks. The code in Example 2-1 is building up a list. In contrast, a listcomp is meant to do one thing only: to build a new list.

Of course, it is possible to abuse list comprehensions to write truly incomprehensible code. I’ve seen Python code with listcomps used just to repeat a block of code for its side effects. If you are not doing something with the produced list, you should not use that syntax. Also, try to keep it short. If the list comprehension spans more than two lines, it is probably best to break it apart or rewrite as a plain old for loop. Use your best judgment: for Python as for English, there are no hard-and-fast rules for clear writing.

Syntax Tip

In Python code, line breaks are ignored inside pairs of [], {}, or (). So you can build multiline lists, listcomps, genexps, dictionaries and the like without using the ugly \ line continuation escape.

Listcomps No Longer Leak Their Variables

In Python 2.x, variables assigned in the for clauses in list comprehensions were set in the surrounding scope, sometimes with tragic consequences. See the following Python 2.7 console session:

Python 2.7.6 (default, Mar 22 2014, 22:59:38)
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> x = 'my precious'
>>> dummy = [x for x in 'ABC']
>>> x
'C'

As you can see, the initial value of x was clobbered. This no longer happens in Python 3.

List comprehensions, generator expressions, and their siblings set and dict comprehensions now have their own local scope, like functions. Variables assigned within the expression are local, but variables in the surrounding scope can still be referenced. Even better, the local variables do not mask the variables from the surrounding scope.

This is Python 3:

>>> x = 'ABC'
>>> dummy = [ord(x) for x in x]
>>> x
'ABC'
>>> dummy
[65, 66, 67]
>>>

The value of x is preserved.

The list comprehension produces the expected list.

List comprehensions build lists from sequences or any other iterable type by filtering and transforming items. The filter and map built-ins can be composed to do the same, but readability suffers, as we will see next.

Listcomps Versus map and filter

Listcomps do everything the map and filter functions do, without the contortions of the functionally challenged Python lambda. Consider Example 2-3.

Example 2-3. The same list built by a listcomp and a map/filter composition

>>> symbols = '$¢£¥€¤'
>>> beyond_ascii = [ord(s) for s in symbols if ord(s) > 127]
>>> beyond_ascii
[162, 163, 165, 8364, 164]
>>> beyond_ascii = list(filter(lambda c: c > 127, map(ord, symbols)))
>>> beyond_ascii
[162, 163, 165, 8364, 164]

I used to believe that map and filter were faster than the equivalent listcomps, but Alex Martelli pointed out that’s not the case—at least not in the preceding examples. The 02-array-seq/listcomp_speed.py script in the Fluent Python code repository is a simple speed test comparing listcomp with filter/map.

I’ll have more to say about map and filter in Chapter 5. Now we turn to the use of listcomps to compute Cartesian products: a list containing tuples built from all items from two or more lists.

Cartesian Products

Listcomps can generate lists from the Cartesian product of two or more iterables. The items that make up the cartesian product are tuples made from items from every input iterable. The resulting list has a length equal to the lengths of the input iterables multiplied. See Figure 2-2.

Figure 2-2. The Cartesian product of a sequence of three card ranks and a sequence of four suits results in a sequence of twelve pairings

For example, imagine you need to produce a list of T-shirts available in two colors and three sizes. Example 2-4 shows how to produce that list using a listcomp. The result has six items.

Example 2-4. Cartesian product using a list comprehension

>>> colors = ['black', 'white']
>>> sizes = ['S', 'M', 'L']
>>> tshirts = [(color, size) for color in colors for size in sizes]
>>> tshirts
[('black', 'S'), ('black', 'M'), ('black', 'L'), ('white', 'S'),
 ('white', 'M'), ('white', 'L')]
>>> for color in colors:
...     for size in sizes:
...         print((color, size))
...
('black', 'S')
('black', 'M')
('black', 'L')
('white', 'S')
('white', 'M')
('white', 'L')
>>> tshirts = [(color, size) for size in sizes
...                          for color in colors]
>>> tshirts
[('black', 'S'), ('white', 'S'), ('black', 'M'), ('white', 'M'),
 ('black', 'L'), ('white', 'L')]

This generates a list of tuples arranged by color, then size.

Note how the resulting list is arranged as if the for loops were nested in the same order as they appear in the listcomp.

To get items arranged by size, then color, just rearrange the for clauses; adding a line break to the listcomp makes it easy to see how the result will be ordered.

In Example 1-1 (Chapter 1), the following expression was used to initialize a card deck with a list made of 52 cards from all 13 ranks of each of the 4 suits, grouped by suit:

        self._cards = [Card(rank, suit) for suit in self.suits
                                        for rank in self.ranks]

Listcomps are a one-trick pony: they build lists. To fill up other sequence types, a genexp is the way to go. The next section is a brief look at genexps in the context of building nonlist sequences.

Generator Expressions

To initialize tuples, arrays, and other types of sequences, you could also start from a listcomp, but a genexp saves memory because it yields items one by one using the iterator protocol instead of building a whole list just to feed another constructor.

Genexps use the same syntax as listcomps, but are enclosed in parentheses rather than brackets.

Example 2-5 shows basic usage of genexps to build a tuple and an array.

Example 2-5. Initializing a tuple and an array from a generator expression

>>> symbols = '$¢£¥€¤'
>>> tuple(ord(symbol) for symbol in symbols)
(36, 162, 163, 165, 8364, 164)
>>> import array
>>> array.array('I', (ord(symbol) for symbol in symbols))
array('I', [36, 162, 163, 165, 8364, 164])

If the generator expression is the single argument in a function call, there is no need to duplicate the enclosing parentheses.

The array constructor takes two arguments, so the parentheses around the generator expression are mandatory. The first argument of the array constructor defines the storage type used for the numbers in the array, as we’ll see in “Arrays”.

Example 2-6 uses a genexp with a Cartesian product to print out a roster of T-shirts of two colors in three sizes. In contrast with Example 2-4, here the six-item list of T-shirts is never built in memory: the generator expression feeds the for loop producing one item at a time. If the two lists used in the Cartesian product had 1,000 items each, using a generator expression would save the expense of building a list with a million items just to feed the for loop.

Example 2-6. Cartesian product in a generator expression

>>> colors = ['black', 'white']
>>> sizes = ['S', 'M', 'L']
>>> for tshirt in ('%s %s' % (c, s) for c in colors for s in sizes):
...     print(tshirt)
...
black S
black M
black L
white S
white M
white L

The generator expression yields items one by one; a list with all six T-shirt variations is never produced in this example.

Chapter 14 is devoted to explaining how generators work in detail. Here the idea was just to show the use of generator expressions to initialize sequences other than lists, or to produce output that you don’t need to keep in memory.

Now we move on to the other fundamental sequence type in Python: the tuple.

Tuples Are Not Just Immutable Lists

Some introductory texts about Python present tuples as “immutable lists,” but that is short selling them. Tuples do double duty: they can be used as immutable lists and also as records with no field names. This use is sometimes overlooked, so we will start with that.

Tuples as Records

Tuples hold records: each item in the tuple holds the data for one field and the position of the item gives its meaning.

If you think of a tuple just as an immutable list, the quantity and the order of the items may or may not be important, depending on the context. But when using a tuple as a collection of fields, the number of items is often fixed and their order is always vital.

Example 2-7 shows tuples being used as records. Note that in every expression, sorting the tuple would destroy the information because the meaning of each data item is given by its position in the tuple.

Example 2-7. Tuples used as records

>>> lax_coordinates = (33.9425, -118.408056)
>>> city, year, pop, chg, area = ('Tokyo', 2003, 32450, 0.66, 8014)
>>> traveler_ids = [('USA', '31195855'), ('BRA', 'CE342567'),
...     ('ESP', 'XDA205856')]
>>> for passport in sorted(traveler_ids):
...     print('%s/%s' % passport)
...
BRA/CE342567
ESP/XDA205856
USA/31195855
>>> for country, _ in traveler_ids:
...     print(country)
...
USA
BRA
ESP

Latitude and longitude of the Los Angeles International Airport.

Data about Tokyo: name, year, population (millions), population change (%), area (km²).

A list of tuples of the form (country_code, passport_number).

As we iterate over the list, passport is bound to each tuple.

The % formatting operator understands tuples and treats each item as a separate field.

The for loop knows how to retrieve the items of a tuple separately—this is called “unpacking.” Here we are not interested in the second item, so it’s assigned to _, a dummy variable.

Tuples work well as records because of the tuple unpacking mechanism—our next subject.

Tuple Unpacking

In Example 2-7, we assigned ('Tokyo', 2003, 32450, 0.66, 8014) to city, year, pop, chg, area in a single statement. Then, in the last line, the % operator assigned each item in the passport tuple to one slot in the format string in the print argument. Those are two examples of tuple unpacking.

Tip

Tuple unpacking works with any iterable object. The only requirement is that the iterable yields exactly one item per variable in the receiving tuple, unless you use a star (*) to capture excess items as explained in “Using * to grab excess items”. The term tuple unpacking is widely used by Pythonistas, but iterable unpacking is gaining traction, as in the title of PEP 3132 — Extended Iterable Unpacking.

The most visible form of tuple unpacking is parallel assignment; that is, assigning items from an iterable to a tuple of variables, as you can see in this example:

>>> lax_coordinates = (33.9425, -118.408056)
>>> latitude, longitude = lax_coordinates  # tuple unpacking
>>> latitude
33.9425
>>> longitude
-118.408056

An elegant application of tuple unpacking is swapping the values of variables without using a temporary variable:

>>> b, a = a, b

Another example of tuple unpacking is prefixing an argument with a star when calling a function:

>>> divmod(20, 8)
(2, 4)
>>> t = (20, 8)
>>> divmod(*t)
(2, 4)
>>> quotient, remainder = divmod(*t)
>>> quotient, remainder
(2, 4)

The preceding code also shows a further use of tuple unpacking: enabling functions to return multiple values in a way that is convenient to the caller. For example, the os.path.split() function builds a tuple (path, last_part) from a filesystem path:

>>> import os
>>> _, filename = os.path.split('/home/luciano/.ssh/idrsa.pub')
>>> filename
'idrsa.pub'

Sometimes when we only care about certain parts of a tuple when unpacking, a dummy variable like _ is used as placeholder, as in the preceding example.

Warning

If you write internationalized software, _ is not a good dummy variable because it is traditionally used as an alias to the gettext.gettext function, as recommended in the gettext module documentation. Otherwise, it’s a nice name for placeholder variable.

Another way of focusing on just some of the items when unpacking a tuple is to use the *, as we’ll see right away.

Using * to grab excess items

Defining function parameters with *args to grab arbitrary excess arguments is a classic Python feature.

In Python 3, this idea was extended to apply to parallel assignment as well:

>>> a, b, *rest = range(5)
>>> a, b, rest
(0, 1, [2, 3, 4])
>>> a, b, *rest = range(3)
>>> a, b, rest
(0, 1, [2])
>>> a, b, *rest = range(2)
>>> a, b, rest
(0, 1, [])

In the context of parallel assignment, the * prefix can be applied to exactly one variable, but it can appear in any position:

>>> a, *body, c, d = range(5)
>>> a, body, c, d
(0, [1, 2], 3, 4)
>>> *head, b, c, d = range(5)
>>> head, b, c, d
([0, 1], 2, 3, 4)

Finally, a powerful feature of tuple unpacking is that it works with nested structures.

Nested Tuple Unpacking

The tuple to receive an expression to unpack can have nested tuples, like (a, b, (c, d)), and Python will do the right thing if the expression matches the nesting structure. Example 2-8 shows nested tuple unpacking in action.

Example 2-8. Unpacking nested tuples to access the longitude

metro_areas = [
    ('Tokyo', 'JP', 36.933, (35.689722, 139.691667)),
    ('Delhi NCR', 'IN', 21.935, (28.613889, 77.208889)),
    ('Mexico City', 'MX', 20.142, (19.433333, -99.133333)),
    ('New York-Newark', 'US', 20.104, (40.808611, -74.020386)),
    ('Sao Paulo', 'BR', 19.649, (-23.547778, -46.635833)),
]

print('{:15} | {:^9} | {:^9}'.format('', 'lat.', 'long.'))
fmt = '{:15} | {:9.4f} | {:9.4f}'
for name, cc, pop, (latitude, longitude) in metro_areas:
    if longitude <= 0:
        print(fmt.format(name, latitude, longitude))

Each tuple holds a record with four fields, the last of which is a coordinate pair.

By assigning the last field to a tuple, we unpack the coordinates.

if longitude <= 0: limits the output to metropolitan areas in the Western hemisphere.

The output of Example 2-8 is:

                |   lat.    |   long.
Mexico City     |   19.4333 |  -99.1333
New York-Newark |   40.8086 |  -74.0204
Sao Paulo       |  -23.5478 |  -46.6358

Warning

Before Python 3, it was possible to define functions with nested tuples in the formal parameters (e.g., def fn(a, (b, c), d):). This is no longer supported in Python 3 function definitions, for practical reasons explained in PEP 3113 — Removal of Tuple Parameter Unpacking. To be clear: nothing changed from the perspective of users calling a function. The restriction applies only to the definition of functions.

As designed, tuples are very handy. But there is a missing feature when using them as records: sometimes it is desirable to name the fields. That is why the namedtuple function was invented. Read on.

Named Tuples

The collections.namedtuple function is a factory that produces subclasses of tuple enhanced with field names and a class name—which helps debugging.

Tip

Instances of a class that you build with namedtuple take exactly the same amount of memory as tuples because the field names are stored in the class. They use less memory than a regular object because they don’t store attributes in a per-instance __dict__.

Recall how we built the Card class in Example 1-1 in Chapter 1:

Card = collections.namedtuple('Card', ['rank', 'suit'])

Example 2-9 shows how we could define a named tuple to hold information about a city.

Example 2-9. Defining and using a named tuple type

>>> from collections import namedtuple
>>> City = namedtuple('City', 'name country population coordinates')
>>> tokyo = City('Tokyo', 'JP', 36.933, (35.689722, 139.691667))
>>> tokyo
City(name='Tokyo', country='JP', population=36.933, coordinates=(35.689722,
139.691667))
>>> tokyo.population
36.933
>>> tokyo.coordinates
(35.689722, 139.691667)
>>> tokyo[1]
'JP'

Two parameters are required to create a named tuple: a class name and a list of field names, which can be given as an iterable of strings or as a single space-delimited string.

Data must be passed as positional arguments to the constructor (in contrast, the tuple constructor takes a single iterable).

You can access the fields by name or position.

A named tuple type has a few attributes in addition to those inherited from tuple. Example 2-10 shows the most useful: the _fields class attribute, the class method _make(iterable), and the _asdict() instance method.

Example 2-10. Named tuple attributes and methods (continued from the previous example)

>>> City._fields
('name', 'country', 'population', 'coordinates')
>>> LatLong = namedtuple('LatLong', 'lat long')
>>> delhi_data = ('Delhi NCR', 'IN', 21.935, LatLong(28.613889, 77.208889))
>>> delhi = City._make(delhi_data)
>>> delhi._asdict()
OrderedDict([('name', 'Delhi NCR'), ('country', 'IN'), ('population',
21.935), ('coordinates', LatLong(lat=28.613889, long=77.208889))])
>>> for key, value in delhi._asdict().items():
        print(key + ':', value)

name: Delhi NCR
country: IN
population: 21.935
coordinates: LatLong(lat=28.613889, long=77.208889)
>>>

_fields is a tuple with the field names of the class.

_make() allow you to instantiate a named tuple from an iterable; City(*delhi_data) would do the same.

_asdict() returns a collections.OrderedDict built from the named tuple instance. That can be used to produce a nice display of city data.

Now that we’ve explored the power of tuples as records, we can consider their second role as an immutable variant of the list type.

Tuples as Immutable Lists

When using a tuple as an immutable variation of list, it helps to know how similar they actually are. As you can see in Table 2-1, tuple supports all list methods that do not involve adding or removing items, with one exception—tuple lacks the __reversed__ method. However, that is just for optimization; reversed(my_tuple) works without it.

Table 2-1. Methods and attributes found in list or tuple (methods implemented by object are omitted for brevity)

list
tuple

s.__add__(s2)

●

●

s + s2—concatenation

s.__iadd__(s2)

●

s += s2—in-place concatenation

s.append(e)

●

Append one element after last

s.clear()

●

Delete all items

s.__contains__(e)

●

●

e in s

s.copy()

●

Shallow copy of the list

s.count(e)

●

●

Count occurrences of an element

s.__delitem__(p)

●

Remove item at position p

s.extend(it)

●

Append items from iterable it

s.__getitem__(p)

●

●

s[p]—get item at position

s.__getnewargs__()

●

Support for optimized serialization with pickle

s.index(e)

●

●

Find position of first occurrence of e

s.insert(p, e)

●

Insert element e before the item at position p

s.__iter__()

●

●

Get iterator

s.__len__()

●

●

len(s)—number of items

s.__mul__(n)

●

●

s * n—repeated concatenation

s.__imul__(n)

●

s *= n—in-place repeated concatenation

s.__rmul__(n)

●

●

n * s—reversed repeated concatenationa

s.pop([p])

●

Remove and return last item or item at optional position p

s.remove(e)

●

Remove first occurrence of element e by value

s.reverse()

●

Reverse the order of the items in place

s.__reversed__()

●

Get iterator to scan items from last to first

s.__setitem__(p, e)

●

s[p] = e—put e in position p, overwriting existing item

s.sort([key], [reverse])

●

Sort items in place with optional keyword arguments key and reverse

a Reversed operators are explained in Chapter 13.

Every Python programmer knows that sequences can be sliced using the s[a:b] syntax. We now turn to some less well-known facts about slicing.

Slicing

A common feature of list, tuple, str, and all sequence types in Python is the support of slicing operations, which are more powerful than most people realize.

In this section, we describe the use of these advanced forms of slicing. Their implementation in a user-defined class will be covered in Chapter 10, in keeping with our philosophy of covering ready-to-use classes in this part of the book, and creating new classes in Part IV.

Why Slices and Range Exclude the Last Item

The Pythonic convention of excluding the last item in slices and ranges works well with the zero-based indexing used in Python, C, and many other languages. Some convenient features of the convention are:

It’s easy to see the length of a slice or range when only the stop position is given: range(3) and my_list[:3] both produce three items.

It’s easy to compute the length of a slice or range when start and stop are given: just subtract stop - start.

It’s easy to split a sequence in two parts at any index x, without overlapping: simply get my_list[:x] and my_list[x:]. For example:

>>> l = [10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60]
>>> l[:2]  # split at 2
[10, 20]
>>> l[2:]
[30, 40, 50, 60]
>>> l[:3]  # split at 3
[10, 20, 30]
>>> l[3:]
[40, 50, 60]

But the best arguments for this convention were written by the Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra (see the last reference in “Further Reading”).

Now let’s take a close look at how Python interprets slice notation.

Slice Objects

This is no secret, but worth repeating just in case: s[a:b:c] can be used to specify a stride or step c, causing the resulting slice to skip items. The stride can also be negative, returning items in reverse. Three examples make this clear:

>>> s = 'bicycle'
>>> s[::3]
'bye'
>>> s[::-1]
'elcycib'
>>> s[::-2]
'eccb'

Another example was shown in Chapter 1 when we used deck[12::13] to get all the aces in the unshuffled deck:

>>> deck[12::13]
[Card(rank='A', suit='spades'), Card(rank='A', suit='diamonds'),
Card(rank='A', suit='clubs'), Card(rank='A', suit='hearts')]

The notation a:b:c is only valid within [] when used as the indexing or subscript operator, and it produces a slice object: slice(a, b, c). As we will see in “How Slicing Works”, to evaluate the expression seq[start:stop:step], Python calls seq.__getitem__(slice(start, stop, step)). Even if you are not implementing your own sequence types, knowing about slice objects is useful because it lets you assign names to slices, just like spreadsheets allow naming of cell ranges.

Suppose you need to parse flat-file data like the invoice shown in Example 2-11. Instead of filling your code with hardcoded slices, you can name them. See how readable this makes the for loop at the end of the example.

Example 2-11. Line items from a flat-file invoice

>>> invoice = """
... 0.....6.................................40........52...55........
... 1909  Pimoroni PiBrella                     $17.50    3    $52.50
... 1489  6mm Tactile Switch x20                 $4.95    2     $9.90
... 1510  Panavise Jr. - PV-201                 $28.00    1    $28.00
... 1601  PiTFT Mini Kit 320x240                $34.95    1    $34.95
... """
>>> SKU = slice(0, 6)
>>> DESCRIPTION = slice(6, 40)
>>> UNIT_PRICE = slice(40, 52)
>>> QUANTITY =  slice(52, 55)
>>> ITEM_TOTAL = slice(55, None)
>>> line_items = invoice.split('\n')[2:]
>>> for item in line_items:
...     print(item[UNIT_PRICE], item[DESCRIPTION])
...
    $17.50   Pimoroni PiBrella
     $4.95   6mm Tactile Switch x20
    $28.00   Panavise Jr. - PV-201
    $34.95   PiTFT Mini Kit 320x240

We’ll come back to slice objects when we discuss creating your own collections in “Vector Take #2: A Sliceable Sequence”. Meanwhile, from a user perspective, slicing includes additional features such as multidimensional slices and ellipsis (...) notation. Read on.

Multidimensional Slicing and Ellipsis

The [] operator can also take multiple indexes or slices separated by commas. This is used, for instance, in the external NumPy package, where items of a two-dimensional numpy.ndarray can be fetched using the syntax a[i, j] and a two-dimensional slice obtained with an expression like a[m:n, k:l]. Example 2-22 later in this chapter shows the use of this notation. The __getitem__ and __setitem__ special methods that handle the [] operator simply receive the indices in a[i, j] as a tuple. In other words, to evaluate a[i, j], Python calls a.__getitem__((i, j)).

The built-in sequence types in Python are one-dimensional, so they support only one index or slice, and not a tuple of them.

The ellipsis—written with three full stops (...) and not … (Unicode U+2026)—is recognized as a token by the Python parser. It is an alias to the Ellipsis object, the single instance of the ellipsis class.² As such, it can be passed as an argument to functions and as part of a slice specification, as in f(a, ..., z) or a[i:...]. NumPy uses ... as a shortcut when slicing arrays of many dimensions; for example, if x is a four-dimensional array, x[i, ...] is a shortcut for x[i, :, :, :,]. See the Tentative NumPy Tutorial to learn more about this.

At the time of this writing, I am unaware of uses of Ellipsis or multidimensional indexes and slices in the Python standard library. If you spot one, let me know. These syntactic features exist to support user-defined types and extensions such as NumPy.

Slices are not just useful to extract information from sequences; they can also be used to change mutable sequences in place—that is, without rebuilding them from scratch.

Assigning to Slices

Mutable sequences can be grafted, excised, and otherwise modified in place using slice notation on the left side of an assignment statement or as the target of a del statement. The next few examples give an idea of the power of this notation:

>>> l = list(range(10))
>>> l
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
>>> l[2:5] = [20, 30]
>>> l
[0, 1, 20, 30, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
>>> del l[5:7]
>>> l
[0, 1, 20, 30, 5, 8, 9]
>>> l[3::2] = [11, 22]
>>> l
[0, 1, 20, 11, 5, 22, 9]
>>> l[2:5] = 100
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: can only assign an iterable
>>> l[2:5] = [100]
>>> l
[0, 1, 100, 22, 9]

When the target of the assignment is a slice, the right side must be an iterable object, even if it has just one item.

Everybody knows that concatenation is a common operation with sequences of any type. Any introductory Python text explains the use of + and * for that purpose, but there are some subtle details on how they work, which we cover next.

Using + and * with Sequences

Python programmers expect that sequences support + and *. Usually both operands of + must be of the same sequence type, and neither of them is modified but a new sequence of the same type is created as result of the concatenation.

To concatenate multiple copies of the same sequence, multiply it by an integer. Again, a new sequence is created:

>>> l = [1, 2, 3]
>>> l * 5
[1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3]
>>> 5 * 'abcd'
'abcdabcdabcdabcdabcd'

Both + and * always create a new object, and never change their operands.

Warning

Beware of expressions like a * n when a is a sequence containing mutable items because the result may surprise you. For example, trying to initialize a list of lists as my_list = [[]] * 3 will result in a list with three references to the same inner list, which is probably not what you want.

The next section covers the pitfalls of trying to use * to initialize a list of lists.

Building Lists of Lists

Sometimes we need to initialize a list with a certain number of nested lists—for example, to distribute students in a list of teams or to represent squares on a game board. The best way of doing so is with a list comprehension, as in Example 2-12.

Example 2-12. A list with three lists of length 3 can represent a tic-tac-toe board

>>> board = [['_'] * 3 for i in range(3)]
>>> board
[['_', '_', '_'], ['_', '_', '_'], ['_', '_', '_']]
>>> board[1][2] = 'X'
>>> board
[['_', '_', '_'], ['_', '_', 'X'], ['_', '_', '_']]

Create a list of three lists of three items each. Inspect the structure.

Place a mark in row 1, column 2, and check the result.

A tempting but wrong shortcut is doing it like Example 2-13.

Example 2-13. A list with three references to the same list is useless

>>> weird_board = [['_'] * 3] * 3
>>> weird_board
[['_', '_', '_'], ['_', '_', '_'], ['_', '_', '_']]
>>> weird_board[1][2] = 'O'
>>> weird_board
[['_', '_', 'O'], ['_', '_', 'O'], ['_', '_', 'O']]

The outer list is made of three references to the same inner list. While it is unchanged, all seems right.

Placing a mark in row 1, column 2, reveals that all rows are aliases referring to the same object.

The problem with Example 2-13 is that, in essence, it behaves like this code:

row = ['_'] * 3
board = []
for i in range(3):
    board.append(row)

The same row is appended three times to board.

On the other hand, the list comprehension from Example 2-12 is equivalent to this code:

>>> board = []
>>> for i in range(3):
...     row = ['_'] * 3
...     board.append(row)
...
>>> board
[['_', '_', '_'], ['_', '_', '_'], ['_', '_', '_']]
>>> board[2][0] = 'X'
>>> board
[['_', '_', '_'], ['_', '_', '_'], ['X', '_', '_']]

Each iteration builds a new row and appends it to board.

Only row 2 is changed, as expected.

Tip

If either the problem or the solution in this section are not clear to you, relax. Chapter 8 was written to clarify the mechanics and pitfalls of references and mutable objects.

So far we have discussed the use of the plain + and * operators with sequences, but there are also the += and *= operators, which produce very different results depending on the mutability of the target sequence. The following section explains how that works.

Augmented Assignment with Sequences

The augmented assignment operators += and *= behave very differently depending on the first operand. To simplify the discussion, we will focus on augmented addition first (+=), but the concepts also apply to *= and to other augmented assignment operators.

The special method that makes += work is __iadd__ (for “in-place addition”). However, if __iadd__ is not implemented, Python falls back to calling __add__. Consider this simple expression:

>>> a += b

If a implements __iadd__, that will be called. In the case of mutable sequences (e.g., list, bytearray, array.array), a will be changed in place (i.e., the effect will be similar to a.extend(b)). However, when a does not implement __iadd__, the expression a += b has the same effect as a = a + b: the expression a + b is evaluated first, producing a new object, which is then bound to a. In other words, the identity of the object bound to a may or may not change, depending on the availability of __iadd__.

In general, for mutable sequences, it is a good bet that __iadd__ is implemented and that += happens in place. For immutable sequences, clearly there is no way for that to happen.

What I just wrote about += also applies to *=, which is implemented via __imul__. The __iadd__ and __imul__ special methods are discussed in Chapter 13.

Here is a demonstration of *= with a mutable sequence and then an immutable one:

>>> l = [1, 2, 3]
>>> id(l)
4311953800
>>> l *= 2
>>> l
[1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3]
>>> id(l)
4311953800
>>> t = (1, 2, 3)
>>> id(t)
4312681568
>>> t *= 2
>>> id(t)
4301348296

ID of the initial list

After multiplication, the list is the same object, with new items appended

ID of the initial tuple

After multiplication, a new tuple was created

Repeated concatenation of immutable sequences is inefficient, because instead of just appending new items, the interpreter has to copy the whole target sequence to create a new one with the new items concatenated.³

We’ve seen common use cases for +=. The next section shows an intriguing corner case that highlights what “immutable” really means in the context of tuples.

A += Assignment Puzzler

Try to answer without using the console: what is the result of evaluating the two expressions in Example 2-14?⁴

Example 2-14. A riddle

>>> t = (1, 2, [30, 40])
>>> t[2] += [50, 60]

What happens next? Choose the best answer:

t becomes (1, 2, [30, 40, 50, 60]).

TypeError is raised with the message 'tuple' object does not support item assignment.

Neither.

Both A and B.

When I saw this, I was pretty sure the answer was B, but it’s actually D, “Both A and B.”! Example 2-15 is the actual output from a Python 3.4 console (actually the result is the same in a Python 2.7 console).⁵

Example 2-15. The unexpected result: item t2 is changed and an exception is raised

>>> t = (1, 2, [30, 40])
>>> t[2] += [50, 60]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment
>>> t
(1, 2, [30, 40, 50, 60])

Online Python Tutor is an awesome online tool to visualize how Python works in detail. Figure 2-3 is a composite of two screenshots showing the initial and final states of the tuple t from Example 2-15.

Figure 2-3. Initial and final state of the tuple assignment puzzler (diagram generated by Online Python Tutor)

If you look at the bytecode Python generates for the expression s[a] += b (Example 2-16), it becomes clear how that happens.

Example 2-16. Bytecode for the expression s[a] += b

>>> dis.dis('s[a] += b')
  1           0 LOAD_NAME                0 (s)
              3 LOAD_NAME                1 (a)
              6 DUP_TOP_TWO
              7 BINARY_SUBSCR
              8 LOAD_NAME                2 (b)
             11 INPLACE_ADD
             12 ROT_THREE
             13 STORE_SUBSCR
             14 LOAD_CONST               0 (None)
             17 RETURN_VALUE

Put the value of s[a] on TOS (Top Of Stack).

Perform TOS += b. This succeeds if TOS refers to a mutable object (it’s a list, in Example 2-15).

Assign s[a] = TOS. This fails if s is immutable (the t tuple in Example 2-15).

This example is quite a corner case—in 15 years of using Python, I have never seen this strange behavior actually bite somebody.

I take three lessons from this:

Putting mutable items in tuples is not a good idea.

Augmented assignment is not an atomic operation—we just saw it throwing an exception after doing part of its job.

Inspecting Python bytecode is not too difficult, and is often helpful to see what is going on under the hood.

After witnessing the subtleties of using + and * for concatenation, we can change the subject to another essential operation with sequences: sorting.

list.sort and the sorted Built-In Function

The list.sort method sorts a list in place—that is, without making a copy. It returns None to remind us that it changes the target object, and does not create a new list. This is an important Python API convention: functions or methods that change an object in place should return None to make it clear to the caller that the object itself was changed, and no new object was created. The same behavior can be seen, for example, in the random.shuffle function.

Note

The convention of returning None to signal in-place changes has a drawback: you cannot cascade calls to those methods. In contrast, methods that return new objects (e.g., all str methods) can be cascaded in the fluent interface style. See Wikipedia’s “Fluent interface” entry for further description of this topic.

In contrast, the built-in function sorted creates a new list and returns it. In fact, it accepts any iterable object as an argument, including immutable sequences and generators (see Chapter 14). Regardless of the type of iterable given to sorted, it always returns a newly created list.

Both list.sort and sorted take two optional, keyword-only arguments:

reverse

If True, the items are returned in descending order (i.e., by reversing the comparison of the items). The default is False.

key

A one-argument function that will be applied to each item to produce its sorting key. For example, when sorting a list of strings, key=str.lower can be used to perform a case-insensitive sort, and key=len will sort the strings by character length. The default is the identity function (i.e., the items themselves are compared).

Tip

The key optional keyword parameter can also be used with the min() and max() built-ins and with other functions from the standard library (e.g., itertools.groupby() and heapq.nlargest()).

Here are a few examples to clarify the use of these functions and keyword arguments⁶:

>>> fruits = ['grape', 'raspberry', 'apple', 'banana']
>>> sorted(fruits)
['apple', 'banana', 'grape', 'raspberry']
>>> fruits
['grape', 'raspberry', 'apple', 'banana']
>>> sorted(fruits, reverse=True)
['raspberry', 'grape', 'banana', 'apple']
>>> sorted(fruits, key=len)
['grape', 'apple', 'banana', 'raspberry']
>>> sorted(fruits, key=len, reverse=True)
['raspberry', 'banana', 'grape', 'apple']
>>> fruits
['grape', 'raspberry', 'apple', 'banana']
>>> fruits.sort()
>>> fruits
['apple', 'banana', 'grape', 'raspberry']

This produces a new list of strings sorted alphabetically.

Inspecting the original list, we see it is unchanged.

This is simply reverse alphabetical ordering.

A new list of strings, now sorted by length. Because the sorting algorithm is stable, “grape” and “apple,” both of length 5, are in the original order.

These are the strings sorted in descending order of length. It is not the reverse of the previous result because the sorting is stable, so again “grape” appears before “apple.”

So far, the ordering of the original fruits list has not changed.

This sorts the list in place, and returns None (which the console omits).

Now fruits is sorted.

Once your sequences are sorted, they can be very efficiently searched. Fortunately, the standard binary search algorithm is already provided in the bisect module of the Python standard library. We discuss its essential features next, including the convenient bisect.insort function, which you can use to make sure that your sorted sequences stay sorted.

Managing Ordered Sequences with bisect

The bisect module offers two main functions—bisect and insort—that use the binary search algorithm to quickly find and insert items in any sorted sequence.

Searching with bisect

bisect(haystack, needle) does a binary search for needle in haystack—which must be a sorted sequence—to locate the position where needle can be inserted while maintaining haystack in ascending order. In other words, all items appearing up to that position are less than or equal to needle. You could use the result of bisect(haystack, needle) as the index argument to haystack.insert(index, needle)—however, using insort does both steps, and is faster.

Tip

Raymond Hettinger—a prolific Python contributor—has a SortedCollection recipe that leverages the bisect module but is easier to use than these standalone functions.

Example 2-17 uses a carefully chosen set of “needles” to demonstrate the insert positions returned by bisect. Its output is in Figure 2-4.

Example 2-17. bisect finds insertion points for items in a sorted sequence

import bisect
import sys

HAYSTACK = [1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12, 15, 20, 21, 23, 23, 26, 29, 30]
NEEDLES = [0, 1, 2, 5, 8, 10, 22, 23, 29, 30, 31]

ROW_FMT = '{0:2d} @ {1:2d}    {2}{0:<2d}'

def demo(bisect_fn):
    for needle in reversed(NEEDLES):
        position = bisect_fn(HAYSTACK, needle)
        offset = position * '  |'
        print(ROW_FMT.format(needle, position, offset))

if __name__ == '__main__':

    if sys.argv[-1] == 'left':
        bisect_fn = bisect.bisect_left
    else:
        bisect_fn = bisect.bisect

    print('DEMO:', bisect_fn.__name__)
    print('haystack ->', ' '.join('%2d' % n for n in HAYSTACK))
    demo(bisect_fn)

Use the chosen bisect function to get the insertion point.

Build a pattern of vertical bars proportional to the offset.

Print formatted row showing needle and insertion point.

Choose the bisect function to use according to the last command-line argument.

Print header with name of function selected.

Figure 2-4. Output of Example 2-17 with bisect in use—each row starts with the notation needle @ position and the needle value appears again below its insertion point in the haystack

The behavior of bisect can be fine-tuned in two ways.

First, a pair of optional arguments, lo and hi, allow narrowing the region in the sequence to be searched when inserting. lo defaults to 0 and hi to the len() of the sequence.

Second, bisect is actually an alias for bisect_right, and there is a sister function called bisect_left. Their difference is apparent only when the needle compares equal to an item in the list: bisect_right returns an insertion point after the existing item, and bisect_left returns the position of the existing item, so insertion would occur before it. With simple types like int this makes no difference, but if the sequence contains objects that are distinct yet compare equal, then it may be relevant. For example, 1 and 1.0 are distinct, but 1 == 1.0 is True. Figure 2-5 shows the result of using bisect_left.

Figure 2-5. Output of Example 2-17 with bisect_left in use (compare with Figure 2-4 and note the insertion points for the values 1, 8, 23, 29, and 30 to the left of the same numbers in the haystack).

An interesting application of bisect is to perform table lookups by numeric values—for example, to convert test scores to letter grades, as in Example 2-18.

Example 2-18. Given a test score, grade returns the corresponding letter grade

>>> def grade(score, breakpoints=[60, 70, 80, 90], grades='FDCBA'):
...     i = bisect.bisect(breakpoints, score)
...     return grades[i]
...
>>> [grade(score) for score in [33, 99, 77, 70, 89, 90, 100]]
['F', 'A', 'C', 'C', 'B', 'A', 'A']

The code in Example 2-18 is from the bisect module documentation, which also lists functions to use bisect as a faster replacement for the index method when searching through long ordered sequences of numbers.

These functions are not only used for searching, but also for inserting items in sorted sequences, as the following section shows.

Inserting with bisect.insort

Sorting is expensive, so once you have a sorted sequence, it’s good to keep it that way. That is why bisect.insort was created.

insort(seq, item) inserts item into seq so as to keep seq in ascending order. See Example 2-19 and its output in Figure 2-6.

Example 2-19. Insort keeps a sorted sequence always sorted

import bisect
import random

SIZE = 7

random.seed(1729)

my_list = []
for i in range(SIZE):
    new_item = random.randrange(SIZE*2)
    bisect.insort(my_list, new_item)
    print('%2d ->' % new_item, my_list)

Figure 2-6. Output of Example 2-19

Like bisect, insort takes optional lo, hi arguments to limit the search to a sub-sequence. There is also an insort_left variation that uses bisect_left to find insertion points.

Much of what we have seen so far in this chapter applies to sequences in general, not just lists or tuples. Python programmers sometimes overuse the list type because it is so handy—I know I’ve done it. If you are handling lists of numbers, arrays are the way to go. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to them.

When a List Is Not the Answer

The list type is flexible and easy to use, but depending on specific requirements, there are better options. For example, if you need to store 10 million floating-point values, an array is much more efficient, because an array does not actually hold full-fledged float objects, but only the packed bytes representing their machine values—just like an array in the C language. On the other hand, if you are constantly adding and removing items from the ends of a list as a FIFO data structure, a deque (double-ended queue) works faster.

Tip

If your code does a lot of containment checks (e.g., item in my_collection), consider using a set for my_collection, especially if it holds a large number of items. Sets are optimized for fast membership checking. But they are not sequences (their content is unordered). We cover them in Chapter 3.

For the remainder of this chapter, we discuss mutable sequence types that can replace lists in many cases, starting with arrays.

Arrays

If the list will only contain numbers, an array.array is more efficient than a list: it supports all mutable sequence operations (including .pop, .insert, and .extend), and additional methods for fast loading and saving such as .frombytes and .tofile.

A Python array is as lean as a C array. When creating an array, you provide a typecode, a letter to determine the underlying C type used to store each item in the array. For example, b is the typecode for signed char. If you create an array('b'), then each item will be stored in a single byte and interpreted as an integer from –128 to 127. For large sequences of numbers, this saves a lot of memory. And Python will not let you put any number that does not match the type for the array.

Example 2-20 shows creating, saving, and loading an array of 10 million floating-point random numbers.

Example 2-20. Creating, saving, and loading a large array of floats

>>> from array import array
>>> from random import random
>>> floats = array('d', (random() for i in range(10**7)))
>>> floats[-1]
0.07802343889111107
>>> fp = open('floats.bin', 'wb')
>>> floats.tofile(fp)
>>> fp.close()
>>> floats2 = array('d')
>>> fp = open('floats.bin', 'rb')
>>> floats2.fromfile(fp, 10**7)
>>> fp.close()
>>> floats2[-1]
0.07802343889111107
>>> floats2 == floats
True

Import the array type.

Create an array of double-precision floats (typecode 'd') from any iterable object—in this case, a generator expression.

Inspect the last number in the array.

Save the array to a binary file.

Create an empty array of doubles.

Read 10 million numbers from the binary file.

Inspect the last number in the array.

Verify that the contents of the arrays match.

As you can see, array.tofile and array.fromfile are easy to use. If you try the example, you’ll notice they are also very fast. A quick experiment show that it takes about 0.1s for array.fromfile to load 10 million double-precision floats from a binary file created with array.tofile. That is nearly 60 times faster than reading the numbers from a text file, which also involves parsing each line with the float built-in. Saving with array.tofile is about 7 times faster than writing one float per line in a text file. In addition, the size of the binary file with 10 million doubles is 80,000,000 bytes (8 bytes per double, zero overhead), while the text file has 181,515,739 bytes, for the same data.

Tip

Another fast and more flexible way of saving numeric data is the pickle module for object serialization. Saving an array of floats with pickle.dump is almost as fast as with array.tofile—however, pickle handles almost all built-in types, including complex numbers, nested collections, and even instances of user-defined classes automatically (if they are not too tricky in their implementation).

For the specific case of numeric arrays representing binary data, such as raster images, Python has the bytes and bytearray types discussed in Chapter 4.

We wrap up this section on arrays with Table 2-2, comparing the features of list and array.array.

Table 2-2. Methods and attributes found in list or array (deprecated array methods and those also implemented by object were omitted for brevity)

list
array

s.__add__(s2)

●

●

s + s2—concatenation

s.__iadd__(s2)

●

●

s += s2—in-place concatenation

s.append(e)

●

●

Append one element after last

s.byteswap()

●

Swap bytes of all items in array for endianess conversion

s.clear()

●

Delete all items

s.__contains__(e)

●

●

e in s

s.copy()

●

Shallow copy of the list

s.__copy__()

●

Support for copy.copy

s.count(e)

●

●

Count occurrences of an element

s.__deepcopy__()

●

Optimized support for copy.deepcopy

s.__delitem__(p)

●

●

Remove item at position p

s.extend(it)

●

●

Append items from iterable it

s.frombytes(b)

●

Append items from byte sequence interpreted as packed machine values

s.fromfile(f, n)

●

Append n items from binary file f interpreted as packed machine values

s.fromlist(l)

●

Append items from list; if one causes TypeError, none are appended

s.__getitem__(p)

●

●

s[p]—get item at position

s.index(e)

●

●

Find position of first occurrence of e

s.insert(p, e)

●

●

Insert element e before the item at position p

s.itemsize

●

Length in bytes of each array item

s.__iter__()

●

●

Get iterator

s.__len__()

●

●

len(s)—number of items

s.__mul__(n)

●

●

s * n—repeated concatenation

s.__imul__(n)

●

●

s *= n—in-place repeated concatenation

s.__rmul__(n)

●

●

n * s—reversed repeated concatenationa

s.pop([p])

●

●

Remove and return item at position p (default: last)

s.remove(e)

●

●

Remove first occurrence of element e by value

s.reverse()

●

●

Reverse the order of the items in place

s.__reversed__()

●

Get iterator to scan items from last to first

s.__setitem__(p, e)

●

●

s[p] = e—put e in position p, overwriting existing item

s.sort([key], [reverse])

●

Sort items in place with optional keyword arguments key and reverse

s.tobytes()

●

Return items as packed machine values in a bytes object

s.tofile(f)

●

Save items as packed machine values to binary file f

s.tolist()

●

Return items as numeric objects in a list

s.typecode

●

One-character string identifying the C type of the items

a Reversed operators are explained in Chapter 13.

Tip

As of Python 3.4, the array type does not have an in-place sort method like list.sort(). If you need to sort an array, use the sorted function to rebuild it sorted:

a = array.array(a.typecode, sorted(a))

To keep a sorted array sorted while adding items to it, use the bisect.insort function (as seen in “Inserting with bisect.insort”).

If you do a lot of work with arrays and don’t know about memoryview, you’re missing out. See the next topic.

Memory Views

The built-in memoryview class is a shared-memory sequence type that lets you handle slices of arrays without copying bytes. It was inspired by the NumPy library (which we’ll discuss shortly in “NumPy and SciPy”). Travis Oliphant, lead author of NumPy, answers When should a memoryview be used? like this:

A memoryview is essentially a generalized NumPy array structure in Python itself (without the math). It allows you to share memory between data-structures (things like PIL images, SQLlite databases, NumPy arrays, etc.) without first copying. This is very important for large data sets.

Using notation similar to the array module, the memoryview.cast method lets you change the way multiple bytes are read or written as units without moving bits around (just like the C cast operator). memoryview.cast returns yet another memoryview object, always sharing the same memory.

See Example 2-21 for an example of changing a single byte of an array of 16-bit integers.

Example 2-21. Changing the value of an array item by poking one of its bytes

>>> numbers = array.array('h', [-2, -1, 0, 1, 2])
>>> memv = memoryview(numbers)
>>> len(memv)
5
>>> memv[0]
-2
>>> memv_oct = memv.cast('B')
>>> memv_oct.tolist()
[254, 255, 255, 255, 0, 0, 1, 0, 2, 0]
>>> memv_oct[5] = 4
>>> numbers
array('h', [-2, -1, 1024, 1, 2])

Build memoryview from array of 5 short signed integers (typecode 'h').

memv sees the same 5 items in the array.

Create memv_oct by casting the elements of memv to typecode 'B' (unsigned char).

Export elements of memv_oct as a list, for inspection.

Assign value 4 to byte offset 5.

Note change to numbers: a 4 in the most significant byte of a 2-byte unsigned integer is 1024.

We’ll see another short example with memoryview in the context of binary sequence manipulations with struct (Chapter 4, Example 4-4).

Meanwhile, if you are doing advanced numeric processing in arrays, you should be using the NumPy and SciPy libraries. We’ll take a brief look at them right away.

NumPy and SciPy

Throughout this book, I make a point of highlighting what is already in the Python standard library so you can make the most of it. But NumPy and SciPy are so awesome that a detour is warranted.

For advanced array and matrix operations, NumPy and SciPy are the reason why Python became mainstream in scientific computing applications. NumPy implements multi-dimensional, homogeneous arrays and matrix types that hold not only numbers but also user-defined records, and provides efficient elementwise operations.

SciPy is a library, written on top of NumPy, offering many scientific computing algorithms from linear algebra, numerical calculus, and statistics. SciPy is fast and reliable because it leverages the widely used C and Fortran code base from the Netlib Repository. In other words, SciPy gives scientists the best of both worlds: an interactive prompt and high-level Python APIs, together with industrial-strength number-crunching functions optimized in C and Fortran.

As a very brief demo, Example 2-22 shows some basic operations with two-dimensional arrays in NumPy.

Example 2-22. Basic operations with rows and columns in a numpy.ndarray

>>> import numpy
>>> a = numpy.arange(12)
>>> a
array([ 0,  1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9, 10, 11])
>>> type(a)
<class 'numpy.ndarray'>
>>> a.shape
(12,)
>>> a.shape = 3, 4
>>> a
array([[ 0,  1,  2,  3],
       [ 4,  5,  6,  7],
       [ 8,  9, 10, 11]])
>>> a[2]
array([ 8,  9, 10, 11])
>>> a[2, 1]
9
>>> a[:, 1]
array([1, 5, 9])
>>> a.transpose()
array([[ 0,  4,  8],
       [ 1,  5,  9],
       [ 2,  6, 10],
       [ 3,  7, 11]])

Import Numpy, after installing (it’s not in the Python standard library).

Build and inspect a numpy.ndarray with integers 0 to 11.

Inspect the dimensions of the array: this is a one-dimensional, 12-element array.

Change the shape of the array, adding one dimension, then inspecting the result.

Get row at index 2.

Get element at index 2, 1.

Get column at index 1.

Create a new array by transposing (swapping columns with rows).

NumPy also supports high-level operations for loading, saving, and operating on all elements of a numpy.ndarray:

>>> import numpy
>>> floats = numpy.loadtxt('floats-10M-lines.txt')
>>> floats[-3:]
array([ 3016362.69195522,   535281.10514262,  4566560.44373946])
>>> floats *= .5
>>> floats[-3:]
array([ 1508181.34597761,   267640.55257131,  2283280.22186973])
>>> from time import perf_counter as pc
>>> t0 = pc(); floats /= 3; pc() - t0
0.03690556302899495
>>> numpy.save('floats-10M', floats)
>>> floats2 = numpy.load('floats-10M.npy', 'r+')
>>> floats2 *= 6
>>> floats2[-3:]
memmap([ 3016362.69195522,   535281.10514262,  4566560.44373946])

Load 10 million floating-point numbers from a text file.

Use sequence slicing notation to inspect the last three numbers.

Multiply every element in the floats array by .5 and inspect the last three elements again.

Import the high-resolution performance measurement timer (available since Python 3.3).

Divide every element by 3; the elapsed time for 10 million floats is less than 40 milliseconds.

Save the array in a .npy binary file.

Load the data as a memory-mapped file into another array; this allows efficient processing of slices of the array even if it does not fit entirely in memory.

Inspect the last three elements after multiplying every element by 6.

Tip

Installing NumPy and SciPy from source is not a breeze. The Installing the SciPy Stack page on SciPy.org recommends using special scientific Python distributions such as Anaconda, Enthought Canopy, and WinPython, among others. These are large downloads, but come ready to use. Users of popular GNU/Linux distributions can usually find NumPy and SciPy in the standard package repositories. For example, installing them on Debian or Ubuntu is as easy as:

$ sudo apt-get install python-numpy python-scipy

This was just an appetizer. NumPy and SciPy are formidable libraries, and are the foundation of other awesome tools such as the Pandas and Blaze data analysis libraries, which provide efficient array types that can hold nonnumeric data as well as import/export functions compatible with many different formats (e.g., .csv, .xls, SQL dumps, HDF5, etc.). These packages deserve entire books about them. This is not one of those books. But no overview of Python sequences would be complete without at least a quick look at NumPy arrays.

Having looked at flat sequences—standard arrays and NumPy arrays—we now turn to a completely different set of replacements for the plain old list: queues.

Deques and Other Queues

The .append and .pop methods make a list usable as a stack or a queue (if you use .append and .pop(0), you get FIFO behavior). But inserting and removing from the left of a list (the 0-index end) is costly because the entire list must be shifted.

The class collections.deque is a thread-safe double-ended queue designed for fast inserting and removing from both ends. It is also the way to go if you need to keep a list of “last seen items” or something like that, because a deque can be bounded—i.e., created with a maximum length—and then, when it is full, it discards items from the opposite end when you append new ones. Example 2-23 shows some typical operations performed on a deque.

Example 2-23. Working with a deque

>>> from collections import deque
>>> dq = deque(range(10), maxlen=10)
>>> dq
deque([0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], maxlen=10)
>>> dq.rotate(3)
>>> dq
deque([7, 8, 9, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], maxlen=10)
>>> dq.rotate(-4)
>>> dq
deque([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0], maxlen=10)
>>> dq.appendleft(-1)
>>> dq
deque([-1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], maxlen=10)
>>> dq.extend([11, 22, 33])
>>> dq
deque([3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 22, 33], maxlen=10)
>>> dq.extendleft([10, 20, 30, 40])
>>> dq
deque([40, 30, 20, 10, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8], maxlen=10)

The optional maxlen argument sets the maximum number of items allowed in this instance of deque; this sets a read-only maxlen instance attribute.

Rotating with n > 0 takes items from the right end and prepends them to the left; when n < 0 items are taken from left and appended to the right.

Appending to a deque that is full (len(d) == d.maxlen) discards items from the other end; note in the next line that the 0 is dropped.

Adding three items to the right pushes out the leftmost -1, 1, and 2.

Note that extendleft(iter) works by appending each successive item of the iter argument to the left of the deque, therefore the final position of the items is reversed.

Table 2-3 compares the methods that are specific to list and deque (removing those that also appear in object).

Note that deque implements most of the list methods, and adds a few specific to its design, like popleft and rotate. But there is a hidden cost: removing items from the middle of a deque is not as fast. It is really optimized for appending and popping from the ends.

The append and popleft operations are atomic, so deque is safe to use as a FIFO queue in multithreaded applications without the need for using locks.

Table 2-3. Methods implemented in list or deque (those that are also implemented by object were omitted for brevity)

list
deque

s.__add__(s2)

●

s + s2—concatenation

s.__iadd__(s2)

●

●

s += s2—in-place concatenation

s.append(e)

●

●

Append one element to the right (after last)

s.appendleft(e)

●

Append one element to the left (before first)

s.clear()

●

●

Delete all items

s.__contains__(e)

●

e in s

s.copy()

●

Shallow copy of the list

s.__copy__()

●

Support for copy.copy (shallow copy)

s.count(e)

●

●

Count occurrences of an element

s.__delitem__(p)

●

●

Remove item at position p

s.extend(i)

●

●

Append items from iterable i to the right

s.extendleft(i)

●

Append items from iterable i to the left

s.__getitem__(p)

●

●

s[p]—get item at position

s.index(e)

●

Find position of first occurrence of e

s.insert(p, e)

●

Insert element e before the item at position p

s.__iter__()

●

●

Get iterator

s.__len__()

●

●

len(s)—number of items

s.__mul__(n)

●

s * n—repeated concatenation

s.__imul__(n)

●

s *= n—in-place repeated concatenation

s.__rmul__(n)

●

n * s—reversed repeated concatenationa

s.pop()

●

●

Remove and return last itemb

s.popleft()

●

Remove and return first item

s.remove(e)

●

●

Remove first occurrence of element e by value

s.reverse()

●

●

Reverse the order of the items in place

s.__reversed__()

●

●

Get iterator to scan items from last to first

s.rotate(n)

●

Move n items from one end to the other

s.__setitem__(p, e)

●

●

s[p] = e—put e in position p, overwriting existing item

s.sort([key], [reverse])

●

Sort items in place with optional keyword arguments key and reverse

a Reversed operators are explained in Chapter 13.

b a_list.pop(p) allows removing from position p but deque does not support that option.

Besides deque, other Python standard library packages implement queues:

queue

This provides the synchronized (i.e., thread-safe) classes Queue, LifoQueue, and PriorityQueue. These are used for safe communication between threads. All three classes can be bounded by providing a maxsize argument greater than 0 to the constructor. However, they don’t discard items to make room as deque does. Instead, when the queue is full the insertion of a new item blocks—i.e., it waits until some other thread makes room by taking an item from the queue, which is useful to throttle the number of live threads.

multiprocessing

Implements its own bounded Queue, very similar to queue.Queue but designed for interprocess communication. A specialized multiprocessing.JoinableQueue is also available for easier task management.

asyncio

Newly added to Python 3.4, asyncio provides Queue, LifoQueue, PriorityQueue, and JoinableQueue with APIs inspired by the classes contained in the queue and multiprocessing modules, but adapted for managing tasks in asynchronous programming.

heapq

In contrast to the previous three modules, heapq does not implement a queue class, but provides functions like heappush and heappop that let you use a mutable sequence as a heap queue or priority queue.

This ends our overview of alternatives to the list type, and also our exploration of sequence types in general—except for the particulars of str and binary sequences, which have their own chapter (Chapter 4).

Chapter Summary

Mastering the standard library sequence types is a prerequisite for writing concise, effective, and idiomatic Python code.

Python sequences are often categorized as mutable or immutable, but it is also useful to consider a different axis: flat sequences and container sequences. The former are more compact, faster, and easier to use, but are limited to storing atomic data such as numbers, characters, and bytes. Container sequences are more flexible, but may surprise you when they hold mutable objects, so you need to be careful to use them correctly with nested data structures.

List comprehensions and generator expressions are powerful notations to build and initialize sequences. If you are not yet comfortable with them, take the time to master their basic usage. It is not hard, and soon you will be hooked.

Tuples in Python play two roles: as records with unnamed fields and as immutable lists. When a tuple is used as a record, tuple unpacking is the safest, most readable way of getting at the fields. The new * syntax makes tuple unpacking even better by making it easier to ignore some fields and to deal with optional fields. Named tuples are not so new, but deserve more attention: like tuples, they have very little overhead per instance, yet provide convenient access to the fields by name and a handy ._asdict() to export the record as an OrderedDict.

Sequence slicing is a favorite Python syntax feature, and it is even more powerful than many realize. Multidimensional slicing and ellipsis (...) notation, as used in NumPy, may also be supported by user-defined sequences. Assigning to slices is a very expressive way of editing mutable sequences.

Repeated concatenation as in seq * n is convenient and, with care, can be used to initialize lists of lists containing immutable items. Augmented assignment with += and *= behaves differently for mutable and immutable sequences. In the latter case, these operators necessarily build new sequences. But if the target sequence is mutable, it is usually changed in place—but not always, depending on how the sequence is implemented.

The sort method and the sorted built-in function are easy to use and flexible, thanks to the key optional argument they accept, with a function to calculate the ordering criterion. By the way, key can also be used with the min and max built-in functions. To keep a sorted sequence in order, always insert items into it using bisect.insort; to search it efficiently, use bisect.bisect.

Beyond lists and tuples, the Python standard library provides array.array. Although NumPy and SciPy are not part of the standard library, if you do any kind of numerical processing on large sets of data, studying even a small part of these libraries can take you a long way.

We closed by visiting the versatile and thread-safe collections.deque, comparing its API with that of list in Table 2-3 and mentioning other queue implementations in the standard library.

Further Reading

Chapter 1, “Data Structures” of Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition (O’Reilly) by David Beazley and Brian K. Jones has many recipes focusing on sequences, including “Recipe 1.11. Naming a Slice,” from which I learned the trick of assigning slices to variables to improve readability, illustrated in our Example 2-11.

The second edition of Python Cookbook was written for Python 2.4, but much of its code works with Python 3, and a lot of the recipes in Chapters 5 and 6 deal with sequences. The book was edited by Alex Martelli, Anna Martelli Ravenscroft, and David Ascher, and it includes contributions by dozens of Pythonistas. The third edition was rewritten from scratch, and focuses more on the semantics of the language—particularly what has changed in Python 3—while the older volume emphasizes pragmatics (i.e., how to apply the language to real-world problems). Even though some of the second edition solutions are no longer the best approach, I honestly think it is worthwhile to have both editions of Python Cookbook on hand.

The official Python Sorting HOW TO has several examples of advanced tricks for using sorted and list.sort.

PEP 3132 — Extended Iterable Unpacking is the canonical source to read about the new use of *extra as a target in parallel assignments. If you’d like a glimpse of Python evolving, Missing *-unpacking generalizations is a bug tracker issue proposing even wider use of iterable unpacking notation. PEP 448 — Additional Unpacking Generalizations resulted from the discussions in that issue. At the time of this writing, it seems likely the proposed changes will be merged to Python, perhaps in version 3.5.

Eli Bendersky’s blog post “Less Copies in Python with the Buffer Protocol and memoryviews includes a short tutorial on memoryview.

There are numerous books covering NumPy in the market, even some that don’t mention “NumPy” in the title. Wes McKinney’s Python for Data Analysis (O’Reilly) is one such title.

Scientists love the combination of an interactive prompt with the power of NumPy and SciPy so much that they developed IPython, an incredibly powerful replacement for the Python console that also provides a GUI, integrated inline graph plotting, literate programming support (interleaving text with code), and rendering to PDF. Interactive, multimedia IPython sessions can even be shared over HTTP as IPython notebooks. See screenshots and video at The IPython Notebook. IPython is so hot that in 2012 its core developers, most of whom are researchers at UC Berkeley, received a $1.15 million grant from the Sloan Foundation for enhancements to be implemented over the 2013–2014 period.

In The Python Standard Library, 8.3. collections — Container datatypes includes short examples and practical recipes using deque (and other collections).

The best defense of the Python convention of excluding the last item in ranges and slices was written by Edsger W. Dijkstra himself, in a short memo titled “Why Numbering Should Start at Zero”. The subject of the memo is mathematical notation, but it’s relevant to Python because Prof. Dijkstra explains with rigor and humor why the sequence 2, 3, …, 12 should always be expressed as 2 ≤ i < 13. All other reasonable conventions are refuted, as is the idea of letting each user choose a convention. The title refers to zero-based indexing, but the memo is really about why it is desirable that 'ABCDE'[1:3] means 'BC' and not 'BCD' and why it makes perfect sense to write 2, 3, …, 12 as range(2, 13). (By the way, the memo is a handwritten note, but it’s beautiful and totally readable. Somebody should create a Dijkstra font—I’d buy it.)

Soapbox

The Nature of Tuples

In 2012, I presented a poster about the ABC language at PyCon US. Before creating Python, Guido had worked on the ABC interpreter, so he came to see my poster. Among other things, we talked about the ABC compounds, which are clearly the predecessors of Python tuples. Compounds also support parallel assignment and are used as composite keys in dictionaries (or tables, in ABC parlance). However, compounds are not sequences. They are not iterable and you cannot retrieve a field by index, much less slice them. You either handle the compound as whole or extract the individual fields using parallel assignment, that’s all.

I told Guido that these limitations make the main purpose of compounds very clear: they are just records without field names. His response: “Making tuples behave as sequences was a hack.”

This illustrates the pragmatic approach that makes Python so much better and more successful than ABC. From a language implementer perspective, making tuples behave as sequences costs little. As a result, tuples may not be as “conceptually pure” as compounds, but we have many more ways of using them. They can even be used as immutable lists, of all things!

It is really useful to have immutable lists in the language, even if their type is not called frozenlist but is really tuple behaving as a sequence.

“Elegance Begets Simplicity”

The use of the syntax *extra to assign multiple items to a parameter started with function definitions a long time ago (I have a book about Python 1.4 from 1996 that covers that). Starting with Python 1.6, the form *extra can be used in the context of function calls to unpack an iterable into multiple arguments, a complementary operation. This is elegant, makes intuitive sense, and made the apply function redundant (it’s now gone). Now, with Python 3, the *extra notation also works on the left of parallel assignments to grab excess items, enhancing what was already a handy language feature.

With each of these changes, the language became more flexible, more consistent, and simpler at the same time. “Elegance begets simplicity” is the motto on my favorite PyCon T-shirt from Chicago, 2009. It is decorated with a painting by Bruce Eckel depicting hexagram 22 from the I Ching, 賁 (bì), “Adorning,” sometimes translated as “Grace” or “Beauty.”

Flat Versus Container Sequences

To highlight the different memory models of the sequence types, I used the terms container sequence and flat sequence. The “container” word is from the Data Model documentation:

Some objects contain references to other objects; these are called containers.

I used the term “container sequence” to be specific, because there are containers in Python that are not sequences, like dict and set. Container sequences can be nested because they may contain objects of any type, including their own type.

On the other hand, flat sequences are sequence types that cannot be nested because they only hold simple atomic types like integers, floats, or characters.

I adopted the term flat sequence because I needed something to contrast with “container sequence.” I can’t cite a reference to support the use of flat sequence in this specific context: as the category of Python sequence types that are not containers. On Wikipedia, this usage would be tagged “original research.” I prefer to call it “our term,” hoping you’ll find it useful and adopt it too.

Mixed Bag Lists

Introductory Python texts emphasize that lists can contain objects of mixed types, but in practice that feature is not very useful: we put items in a list to process them later, which implies that all items should support at least some operation in common (i.e., they should all “quack” whether or not they are genetically 100% ducks). For example, you can’t sort a list in Python 3 unless the items in it are comparable:

>>> l = [28, 14, '28', 5, '9', '1', 0, 6, '23', 19]
>>> sorted(l)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: unorderable types: str() < int()

Unlike lists, tuples often hold items of different types. That is natural, considering that each item in a tuple is really a field, and each field type is independent of the others.

Key Is Brilliant

The key optional argument of list.sort, sorted, max, and min is a great idea. Other languages force you to provide a two-argument comparison function like the deprecated cmp(a, b) function in Python 2. Using key is both simpler and more efficient. It’s simpler because you just define a one-argument function that retrieves or calculates whatever criterion you want to use to sort your objects; this is easier than writing a two-argument function to return –1, 0, 1. It is also more efficient because the key function is invoked only once per item, while the two-argument comparison is called every time the sorting algorithm needs to compare two items. Of course, Python also has to compare the keys while sorting, but that comparison is done in optimized C code and not in a Python function that you wrote.

By the way, using key actually lets us sort a mixed bag of numbers and number-like strings. You just need to decide whether you want to treat all items as integers or strings:

>>> l = [28, 14, '28', 5, '9', '1', 0, 6, '23', 19]
>>> sorted(l, key=int)
[0, '1', 5, 6, '9', 14, 19, '23', 28, '28']
>>> sorted(l, key=str)
[0, '1', 14, 19, '23', 28, '28', 5, 6, '9']

Oracle, Google, and the Timbot Conspiracy

The sorting algorithm used in sorted and list.sort is Timsort, an adaptive algorithm that switches from insertion sort to merge sort strategies, depending on how ordered the data is. This is efficient because real-world data tends to have runs of sorted items. There is a Wikipedia article about it.

Timsort was first deployed in CPython, in 2002. Since 2009, Timsort is also used to sort arrays in both standard Java and Android, a fact that became widely known when Oracle used some of the code related to Timsort as evidence of Google infringement of Sun’s intellectual property. See Oracle v. Google - Day 14 Filings.

Timsort was invented by Tim Peters, a Python core developer so prolific that he is believed to be an AI, the Timbot. You can read about that conspiracy theory in Python Humor. Tim also wrote The Zen of Python: import this.

¹ Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertens, and Steven Pemberton, ABC Programmer’s Handbook, p. 8.

² No, I did not get this backwards: the ellipsis class name is really all lowercase and the instance is a built-in named Ellipsis, just like bool is lowercase but its instances are True and False.

³ str is an exception to this description. Because string building with += in loops is so common in the wild, CPython is optimized for this use case. str instances are allocated in memory with room to spare, so that concatenation does not require copying the whole string every time.

⁴ Thanks to Leonardo Rochael and Cesar Kawakami for sharing this riddle at the 2013 PythonBrasil Conference.

⁵ A reader suggested that the operation in the example can be performed with t[2].extend([50,60]), without errors. We’re aware of that, but the intent of the example is to discuss the odd behavior of the += operator.

⁶ The examples also demonstrate that Timsort—the sorting algorithm used in Python—is stable (i.e., it preserves the relative ordering of items that compare equal). Timsort is discussed further in the “Soapbox” sidebar at the end of this chapter.

Chapter 3. Dictionaries and Sets

Any running Python program has many dictionaries active at the same time, even if the user’s program code doesn’t explicitly use a dictionary.

A. M. Kuchling, “Python’s Dictionary Implementation: Being All Things to All People”¹

The dict type is not only widely used in our programs but also a fundamental part of the Python implementation. Module namespaces, class and instance attributes, and function keyword arguments are some of the fundamental constructs where dictionaries are deployed. The built-in functions live in __builtins__.__dict__.

Because of their crucial role, Python dicts are highly optimized. Hash tables are the engines behind Python’s high-performance dicts.

We also cover sets in this chapter because they are implemented with hash tables as well. Knowing how a hash table works is key to making the most of dictionaries and sets.

Here is a brief outline of this chapter:

Common dictionary methods

Special handling for missing keys

Variations of dict in the standard library

The set and frozenset types

How hash tables work

Implications of hash tables (key type limitations, unpredictable ordering, etc.)

Generic Mapping Types

The collections.abc module provides the Mapping and MutableMapping ABCs to formalize the interfaces of dict and similar types (in Python 2.6 to 3.2, these classes are imported from the collections module, and not from collections.abc). See Figure 3-1.

Figure 3-1. UML class diagram for the MutableMapping and its superclasses from collections.abc (inheritance arrows point from subclasses to superclasses; names in italic are abstract classes and abstract methods)

Implementations of specialized mappings often extend dict or collections.UserDict, instead of these ABCs. The main value of the ABCs is documenting and formalizing the minimal interfaces for mappings, and serving as criteria for isinstance tests in code that needs to support mappings in a broad sense:

>>> my_dict = {}
>>> isinstance(my_dict, abc.Mapping)
True

Using isinstance is better than checking whether a function argument is of dict type, because then alternative mapping types can be used.

All mapping types in the standard library use the basic dict in their implementation, so they share the limitation that the keys must be hashable (the values need not be hashable, only the keys).

What Is Hashable?

Here is part of the definition of hashable from the Python Glossary:

An object is hashable if it has a hash value which never changes during its lifetime (it needs a __hash__() method), and can be compared to other objects (it needs an __eq__() method). Hashable objects which compare equal must have the same hash value. […]

The atomic immutable types (str, bytes, numeric types) are all hashable. A frozenset is always hashable, because its elements must be hashable by definition. A tuple is hashable only if all its items are hashable. See tuples tt, tl, and tf:

>>> tt = (1, 2, (30, 40))
>>> hash(tt)
8027212646858338501
>>> tl = (1, 2, [30, 40])
>>> hash(tl)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: unhashable type: 'list'
>>> tf = (1, 2, frozenset([30, 40]))
>>> hash(tf)
-4118419923444501110

Warning

At the time of this writing, the Python Glossary states: “All of Python’s immutable built-in objects are hashable” but that is inaccurate because a tuple is immutable, yet it may contain references to unhashable objects.

User-defined types are hashable by default because their hash value is their id() and they all compare not equal. If an object implements a custom __eq__ that takes into account its internal state, it may be hashable only if all its attributes are immutable.

Given these ground rules, you can build dictionaries in several ways. The Built-in Types page in the Library Reference has this example to show the various means of building a dict:

>>> a = dict(one=1, two=2, three=3)
>>> b = {'one': 1, 'two': 2, 'three': 3}
>>> c = dict(zip(['one', 'two', 'three'], [1, 2, 3]))
>>> d = dict([('two', 2), ('one', 1), ('three', 3)])
>>> e = dict({'three': 3, 'one': 1, 'two': 2})
>>> a == b == c == d == e
True

In addition to the literal syntax and the flexible dict constructor, we can use dict comprehensions to build dictionaries. See the next section.

dict Comprehensions

Since Python 2.7, the syntax of listcomps and genexps was applied to dict comprehensions (and set comprehensions as well, which we’ll soon visit). A dictcomp builds a dict instance by producing key:value pair from any iterable. Example 3-1 shows the use of dict comprehensions to build two dictionaries from the same list of tuples.

Example 3-1. Examples of dict comprehensions

>>> DIAL_CODES = [
...         (86, 'China'),
...         (91, 'India'),
...         (1, 'United States'),
...         (62, 'Indonesia'),
...         (55, 'Brazil'),
...         (92, 'Pakistan'),
...         (880, 'Bangladesh'),
...         (234, 'Nigeria'),
...         (7, 'Russia'),
...         (81, 'Japan'),
...     ]
>>> country_code = {country: code for code, country in DIAL_CODES}
>>> country_code
{'China': 86, 'India': 91, 'Bangladesh': 880, 'United States': 1,
'Pakistan': 92, 'Japan': 81, 'Russia': 7, 'Brazil': 55, 'Nigeria':
234, 'Indonesia': 62}
>>> {code: country.upper() for country, code in country_code.items()
...  if code < 66}
{1: 'UNITED STATES', 55: 'BRAZIL', 62: 'INDONESIA', 7: 'RUSSIA'}

A list of pairs can be used directly with the dict constructor.

Here the pairs are reversed: country is the key, and code is the value.

Reversing the pairs again, values uppercased and items filtered by code < 66.

If you’re used to liscomps, dictcomps are a natural next step. If you aren’t, the spread of the listcomp syntax means it’s now more profitable than ever to become fluent in it.

We now move to a panoramic view of the API for mappings.

Overview of Common Mapping Methods

The basic API for mappings is quite rich. Table 3-1 shows the methods implemented by dict and two of its most useful variations: defaultdict and OrderedDict, both defined in the collections module.

Table 3-1. Methods of the mapping types dict, collections.defaultdict, and collections.OrderedDict (common object methods omitted for brevity); optional arguments are enclosed in […]

dict
defaultdict
OrderedDict

d.clear()

●

●

●

Remove all items

d.__contains__(k)

●

●

●

k in d

d.copy()

●

●

●

Shallow copy

d.__copy__()

●

Support for copy.copy

d.default_factory

●

Callable invoked by __missing__ to set missing valuesa

d.__delitem__(k)

●

●

●

del d[k]—remove item with key k

d.fromkeys(it, [initial])

●

●

●

New mapping from keys in iterable, with optional initial value (defaults to None)

d.get(k, [default])

●

●

●

Get item with key k, return default or None if missing

d.__getitem__(k)

●

●

●

d[k]—get item with key k

d.items()

●

●

●

Get view over items—(key, value) pairs

d.__iter__()

●

●

●

Get iterator over keys

d.keys()

●

●

●

Get view over keys

d.__len__()

●

●

●

len(d)—number of items

d.__missing__(k)

●

Called when __getitem__ cannot find the key

d.move_to_end(k, [last])

●

Move k first or last position (last is True by default)

d.pop(k, [default])

●

●

●

Remove and return value at k, or default or None if missing

d.popitem()

●

●

●

Remove and return an arbitrary (key, value) itemb

d.__reversed__()

●

Get iterator for keys from last to first inserted

d.setdefault(k, [default])

●

●

●

If k in d, return d[k]; else set d[k] = default and return it

d.__setitem__(k, v)

●

●

●

d[k] = v—put v at k

d.update(m, [**kargs])

●

●

●

Update d with items from mapping or iterable of (key, value) pairs

d.values()

●

●

●

Get view over values

a default_factory is not a method, but a callable instance attribute set by the end user when defaultdict is instantiated.

b OrderedDict.popitem() removes the first item inserted (FIFO); an optional last argument, if set to True, pops the last item (LIFO).

The way update handles its first argument m is a prime example of duck typing: it first checks whether m has a keys method and, if it does, assumes it is a mapping. Otherwise, update falls back to iterating over m, assuming its items are (key, value) pairs. The constructor for most Python mappings uses the logic of update internally, which means they can be initialized from other mappings or from any iterable object producing (key, value) pairs.

A subtle mapping method is setdefault. We don’t always need it, but when we do, it provides a significant speedup by avoiding redundant key lookups. If you are not comfortable using it, the following section explains how, through a practical example.

Handling Missing Keys with setdefault

In line with the fail-fast philosophy, dict access with d[k] raises an error when k is not an existing key. Every Pythonista knows that d.get(k, default) is an alternative to d[k] whenever a default value is more convenient than handling KeyError. However, when updating the value found (if it is mutable), using either __getitem__ or get is awkward and inefficient. Consider Example 3-2, a suboptimal script written just to show one case where dict.get is not the best way to handle a missing key.

Example 3-2 is adapted from an example by Alex Martelli,² which generates an index like that in Example 3-3.

Example 3-2. index0.py uses dict.get to fetch and update a list of word occurrences from the index (a better solution is in Example 3-4)

"""Build an index mapping word -> list of occurrences"""

import sys
import re

WORD_RE = re.compile(r'\w+')

index = {}
with open(sys.argv[1], encoding='utf-8') as fp:
    for line_no, line in enumerate(fp, 1):
        for match in WORD_RE.finditer(line):
            word = match.group()
            column_no = match.start()+1
            location = (line_no, column_no)
            # this is ugly; coded like this to make a point
            occurrences = index.get(word, [])
            occurrences.append(location)
            index[word] = occurrences

# print in alphabetical order
for word in sorted(index, key=str.upper):
    print(word, index[word])

Get the list of occurrences for word, or [] if not found.

Append new location to occurrences.

Put changed occurrences into index dict; this entails a second search through the index.

In the key= argument of sorted I am not calling str.upper, just passing a reference to that method so the sorted function can use it to normalize the words for sorting.³

Example 3-3. Partial output from Example 3-2 processing the Zen of Python; each line shows a word and a list of occurrences coded as pairs: (line-number, column-number)

$ python3 index0.py ../../data/zen.txt
a [(19, 48), (20, 53)]
Although [(11, 1), (16, 1), (18, 1)]
ambiguity [(14, 16)]
and [(15, 23)]
are [(21, 12)]
aren [(10, 15)]
at [(16, 38)]
bad [(19, 50)]
be [(15, 14), (16, 27), (20, 50)]
beats [(11, 23)]
Beautiful [(3, 1)]
better [(3, 14), (4, 13), (5, 11), (6, 12), (7, 9), (8, 11),
(17, 8), (18, 25)]
...

The three lines dealing with occurrences in Example 3-2 can be replaced by a single line using dict.setdefault. Example 3-4 is closer to Alex Martelli’s original example.

Example 3-4. index.py uses dict.setdefault to fetch and update a list of word occurrences from the index in a single line; contrast with Example 3-2

"""Build an index mapping word -> list of occurrences"""

import sys
import re

WORD_RE = re.compile(r'\w+')

index = {}
with open(sys.argv[1], encoding='utf-8') as fp:
    for line_no, line in enumerate(fp, 1):
        for match in WORD_RE.finditer(line):
            word = match.group()
            column_no = match.start()+1
            location = (line_no, column_no)
            index.setdefault(word, []).append(location)

# print in alphabetical order
for word in sorted(index, key=str.upper):
    print(word, index[word])

Get the list of occurrences for word, or set it to [] if not found; setdefault returns the value, so it can be updated without requiring a second search.

In other words, the end result of this line…

my_dict.setdefault(key, []).append(new_value)

…is the same as running…

if key not in my_dict:
    my_dict[key] = []
my_dict[key].append(new_value)

…except that the latter code performs at least two searches for key—three if it’s not found—while setdefault does it all with a single lookup.

A related issue, handling missing keys on any lookup (and not only when inserting), is the subject of the next section.

Mappings with Flexible Key Lookup

Sometimes it is convenient to have mappings that return some made-up value when a missing key is searched. There are two main approaches to this: one is to use a defaultdict instead of a plain dict. The other is to subclass dict or any other mapping type and add a __missing__ method. Both solutions are covered next.

defaultdict: Another Take on Missing Keys

Example 3-5 uses collections.defaultdict to provide another elegant solution to the problem in Example 3-4. A defaultdict is configured to create items on demand whenever a missing key is searched.

Here is how it works: when instantiating a defaultdict, you provide a callable that is used to produce a default value whenever __getitem__ is passed a nonexistent key argument.

For example, given an empty defaultdict created as dd = defaultdict(list), if 'new-key' is not in dd, the expression dd['new-key'] does the following steps:

Calls list() to create a new list.

Inserts the list into dd using 'new-key' as key.

Returns a reference to that list.

The callable that produces the default values is held in an instance attribute called default_factory.

Example 3-5. index_default.py: using an instance of defaultdict instead of the setdefault method

"""Build an index mapping word -> list of occurrences"""

import sys
import re
import collections

WORD_RE = re.compile(r'\w+')

index = collections.defaultdict(list)
with open(sys.argv[1], encoding='utf-8') as fp:
    for line_no, line in enumerate(fp, 1):
        for match in WORD_RE.finditer(line):
            word = match.group()
            column_no = match.start()+1
            location = (line_no, column_no)
            index[word].append(location)

# print in alphabetical order
for word in sorted(index, key=str.upper):
    print(word, index[word])

Create a defaultdict with the list constructor as default_factory.

If word is not initially in the index, the default_factory is called to produce the missing value, which in this case is an empty list that is then assigned to index[word] and returned, so the .append(location) operation always succeeds.

If no default_factory is provided, the usual KeyError is raised for missing keys.

Warning

The default_factory of a defaultdict is only invoked to provide default values for __getitem__ calls, and not for the other methods. For example, if dd is a defaultdict, and k is a missing key, dd[k] will call the default_factory to create a default value, but dd.get(k) still returns None.

The mechanism that makes defaultdict work by calling default_factory is actually the __missing__ special method, a feature supported by all standard mapping types that we discuss next.

The __missing__ Method

Underlying the way mappings deal with missing keys is the aptly named __missing__ method. This method is not defined in the base dict class, but dict is aware of it: if you subclass dict and provide a __missing__ method, the standard dict.__getitem__ will call it whenever a key is not found, instead of raising KeyError.

Warning

The __missing__ method is just called by __getitem__ (i.e., for the d[k] operator). The presence of a __missing__ method has no effect on the behavior of other methods that look up keys, such as get or __contains__ (which implements the in operator). This is why the default_factory of defaultdict works only with __getitem__, as noted in the warning at the end of the previous section.

Suppose you’d like a mapping where keys are converted to str when looked up. A concrete use case is the Pingo.io project, where a programmable board with GPIO pins (e.g., the Raspberry Pi or the Arduino) is represented by a board object with a board.pins attribute, which is a mapping of physical pin locations to pin objects, and the physical location may be just a number or a string like "A0" or "P9_12". For consistency, it is desirable that all keys in board.pins are strings, but it is also convenient that looking up my_arduino.pin[13] works as well, so beginners are not tripped when they want to blink the LED on pin 13 of their Arduinos. Example 3-6 shows how such a mapping would work.

Example 3-6. When searching for a nonstring key, StrKeyDict0 converts it to str when it is not found

Tests for item retrieval using `d[key]` notation::

    >>> d = StrKeyDict0([('2', 'two'), ('4', 'four')])
    >>> d['2']
    'two'
    >>> d[4]
    'four'
    >>> d[1]
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      ...
    KeyError: '1'

Tests for item retrieval using `d.get(key)` notation::

    >>> d.get('2')
    'two'
    >>> d.get(4)
    'four'
    >>> d.get(1, 'N/A')
    'N/A'

Tests for the `in` operator::

    >>> 2 in d
    True
    >>> 1 in d
    False

Example 3-7 implements a class StrKeyDict0 that passes the preceding tests.

Note

A better way to create a user-defined mapping type is to subclass collections.UserDict instead of dict (as we’ll do in Example 3-8). Here we subclass dict just to show that __missing__ is supported by the built-in dict.__getitem__ method.

Example 3-7. StrKeyDict0 converts nonstring keys to str on lookup (see tests in Example 3-6)

class StrKeyDict0(dict):

    def __missing__(self, key):
        if isinstance(key, str):
            raise KeyError(key)
        return self[str(key)]

    def get(self, key, default=None):
        try:
            return self[key]
        except KeyError:
            return default

    def __contains__(self, key):
        return key in self.keys() or str(key) in self.keys()

StrKeyDict0 inherits from dict.

Check whether key is already a str. If it is, and it’s missing, raise KeyError.

Build str from key and look it up.

The get method delegates to __getitem__ by using the self[key] notation; that gives the opportunity for our __missing__ to act.

If a KeyError was raised, __missing__ already failed, so we return the default.

Search for unmodified key (the instance may contain non-str keys), then for a str built from the key.

Take a moment to consider why the test isinstance(key, str) is necessary in the __missing__ implementation.

Without that test, our __missing__ method would work OK for any key k—str or not str—whenever str(k) produced an existing key. But if str(k) is not an existing key, we’d have an infinite recursion. The last line, self[str(key)] would call __getitem__ passing that str key, which in turn would call __missing__ again.

The __contains__ method is also needed for consistent behavior in this example, because the operation k in d calls it, but the method inherited from dict does not fall back to invoking __missing__. There is a subtle detail in our implementation of __contains__: we do not check for the key in the usual Pythonic way—k in my_dict—because str(key) in self would recursively call __contains__. We avoid this by explicitly looking up the key in self.keys().

Note

A search like k in my_dict.keys() is efficient in Python 3 even for very large mappings because dict.keys() returns a view, which is similar to a set, and containment checks in sets are as fast as in dictionaries. Details are documented in the “Dictionary” view objects section of the documentation. In Python 2, dict.keys() returns a list, so our solution also works there, but it is not efficient for large dictionaries, because k in my_list must scan the list.

The check for the unmodified key—key in self.keys()—is necessary for correctness because StrKeyDict0 does not enforce that all keys in the dictionary must be of type str. Our only goal with this simple example is to make searching “friendlier” and not enforce types.

So far we have covered the dict and defaultdict mapping types, but the standard library comes with other mapping implementations, which we discuss next.

Variations of dict

In this section, we summarize the various mapping types included in the collections module of the standard library, besides defaultdict:

collections.OrderedDict

Maintains keys in insertion order, allowing iteration over items in a predictable order. The popitem method of an OrderedDict pops the last item by default, but if called as my_odict.popitem(last=False), it pops the first item added.

collections.ChainMap

Holds a list of mappings that can be searched as one. The lookup is performed on each mapping in order, and succeeds if the key is found in any of them. This is useful to interpreters for languages with nested scopes, where each mapping represents a scope context. The “ChainMap objects” section of the collections docs has several examples of ChainMap usage, including this snippet inspired by the basic rules of variable lookup in Python:

import builtins
pylookup = ChainMap(locals(), globals(), vars(builtins))

collections.Counter

A mapping that holds an integer count for each key. Updating an existing key adds to its count. This can be used to count instances of hashable objects (the keys) or as a multiset—a set that can hold several occurrences of each element. Counter implements the + and - operators to combine tallies, and other useful methods such as most_common([n]), which returns an ordered list of tuples with the n most common items and their counts; see the documentation. Here is Counter used to count letters in words:

>>> ct = collections.Counter('abracadabra')
>>> ct
Counter({'a': 5, 'b': 2, 'r': 2, 'c': 1, 'd': 1})
>>> ct.update('aaaaazzz')
>>> ct
Counter({'a': 10, 'z': 3, 'b': 2, 'r': 2, 'c': 1, 'd': 1})
>>> ct.most_common(2)
[('a', 10), ('z', 3)]

collections.UserDict

A pure Python implementation of a mapping that works like a standard dict.

While OrderedDict, ChainMap, and Counter come ready to use, UserDict is designed to be subclassed, as we’ll do next.

Subclassing UserDict

It’s almost always easier to create a new mapping type by extending UserDict rather than dict. Its value can be appreciated as we extend our StrKeyDict0 from Example 3-7 to make sure that any keys added to the mapping are stored as str.

The main reason why it’s preferable to subclass from UserDict rather than from dict is that the built-in has some implementation shortcuts that end up forcing us to override methods that we can just inherit from UserDict with no problems.⁴

Note that UserDict does not inherit from dict, but has an internal dict instance, called data, which holds the actual items. This avoids undesired recursion when coding special methods like __setitem__, and simplifies the coding of __contains__, compared to Example 3-7.

Thanks to UserDict, StrKeyDict (Example 3-8) is actually shorter than StrKeyDict0 (Example 3-7), but it does more: it stores all keys as str, avoiding unpleasant surprises if the instance is built or updated with data containing nonstring keys.

Example 3-8. StrKeyDict always converts non-string keys to str—on insertion, update, and lookup

import collections

class StrKeyDict(collections.UserDict):

    def __missing__(self, key):
        if isinstance(key, str):
            raise KeyError(key)
        return self[str(key)]

    def __contains__(self, key):
        return str(key) in self.data

    def __setitem__(self, key, item):
        self.data[str(key)] = item

StrKeyDict extends UserDict.

__missing__ is exactly as in Example 3-7.

__contains__ is simpler: we can assume all stored keys are str and we can check on self.data instead of invoking self.keys() as we did in StrKeyDict0.

__setitem__ converts any key to a str. This method is easier to overwrite when we can delegate to the self.data attribute.

Because UserDict subclasses MutableMapping, the remaining methods that make StrKeyDict a full-fledged mapping are inherited from UserDict, MutableMapping, or Mapping. The latter have several useful concrete methods, in spite of being abstract base classes (ABCs). The following methods are worth noting:

MutableMapping.update

This powerful method can be called directly but is also used by __init__ to load the instance from other mappings, from iterables of (key, value) pairs, and keyword arguments. Because it uses self[key] = value to add items, it ends up calling our implementation of __setitem__.

Mapping.get

In StrKeyDict0 (Example 3-7), we had to code our own get to obtain results consistent with __getitem__, but in Example 3-8 we inherited Mapping.get, which is implemented exactly like StrKeyDict0.get (see Python source code).

Tip

After I wrote StrKeyDict, I discovered that Antoine Pitrou authored PEP 455 — Adding a key-transforming dictionary to collections and a patch to enhance the collections module with a TransformDict. The patch is attached to issue18986 and may land in Python 3.5. To experiment with TransformDict, I extracted it into a standalone module (03-dict-set/transformdict.py in the Fluent Python code repository). TransformDict is more general than StrKeyDict, and is complicated by the requirement to preserve the keys as they were originally inserted.

We know there are several immutable sequence types, but how about an immutable dictionary? Well, there isn’t a real one in the standard library, but a stand-in is available. Read on.

Immutable Mappings

The mapping types provided by the standard library are all mutable, but you may need to guarantee that a user cannot change a mapping by mistake. A concrete use case can be found, again, in the Pingo.io project I described in “The __missing__ Method”: the board.pins mapping represents the physical GPIO pins on the device. As such, it’s nice to prevent inadvertent updates to board.pins because the hardware can’t possibly be changed via software, so any change in the mapping would make it inconsistent with the physical reality of the device.

Since Python 3.3, the types module provides a wrapper class called MappingProxyType, which, given a mapping, returns a mappingproxy instance that is a read-only but dynamic view of the original mapping. This means that updates to the original mapping can be seen in the mappingproxy, but changes cannot be made through it. See Example 3-9 for a brief demonstration.

Example 3-9. MappingProxyType builds a read-only mappingproxy instance from a dict

>>> from types import MappingProxyType
>>> d = {1: 'A'}
>>> d_proxy = MappingProxyType(d)
>>> d_proxy
mappingproxy({1: 'A'})
>>> d_proxy[1]
'A'
>>> d_proxy[2] = 'x'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'mappingproxy' object does not support item assignment
>>> d[2] = 'B'
>>> d_proxy
mappingproxy({1: 'A', 2: 'B'})
>>> d_proxy[2]
'B'
>>>

Items in d can be seen through d_proxy.

Changes cannot be made through d_proxy.

d_proxy is dynamic: any change in d is reflected.

Here is how this could be used in practice in the Pingo.io scenario: the constructor in a concrete Board subclass would fill a private mapping with the pin objects, and expose it to clients of the API via a public .pins attribute implemented as a mappingproxy. That way the clients would not be able to add, remove, or change pins by accident.⁵

Now that we’ve covered most mapping types in the standard library and when to use them, we will move to the set types.

Set Theory

Sets are a relatively new addition in the history of Python, and somewhat underused. The set type and its immutable sibling frozenset first appeared in a module in Python 2.3 and were promoted to built-ins in Python 2.6.

Note

In this book, the word “set” is used to refer both to set and frozenset. When talking specifically about the set class, its name appears in the constant width font used for source code: set.

A set is a collection of unique objects. A basic use case is removing duplication:

>>> l = ['spam', 'spam', 'eggs', 'spam']
>>> set(l)
{'eggs', 'spam'}
>>> list(set(l))
['eggs', 'spam']

Set elements must be hashable. The set type is not hashable, but frozenset is, so you can have frozenset elements inside a set.

In addition to guaranteeing uniqueness, the set types implement the essential set operations as infix operators, so, given two sets a and b, a | b returns their union, a & b computes the intersection, and a - b the difference. Smart use of set operations can reduce both the line count and the runtime of Python programs, at the same time making code easier to read and reason about—by removing loops and lots of conditional logic.

For example, imagine you have a large set of email addresses (the haystack) and a smaller set of addresses (the needles) and you need to count how many needles occur in the haystack. Thanks to set intersection (the & operator) you can code that in a simple line (see Example 3-10).

Example 3-10. Count occurrences of needles in a haystack, both of type set

found = len(needles & haystack)

Without the intersection operator, you’d have write Example 3-11 to accomplish the same task as Example 3-10.

Example 3-11. Count occurrences of needles in a haystack (same end result as Example 3-10)

found = 0
for n in needles:
    if n in haystack:
        found += 1

Example 3-10 runs slightly faster than Example 3-11. On the other hand, Example 3-11 works for any iterable objects needles and haystack, while Example 3-10 requires that both be sets. But, if you don’t have sets on hand, you can always build them on the fly, as shown in Example 3-12.

Example 3-12. Count occurrences of needles in a haystack; these lines work for any iterable types

found = len(set(needles) & set(haystack))

# another way:
found = len(set(needles).intersection(haystack))

Of course, there is an extra cost involved in building the sets in Example 3-12, but if either the needles or the haystack is already a set, the alternatives in Example 3-12 may be cheaper than Example 3-11.

Any one of the preceding examples are capable of searching 1,000 values in a haystack of 10,000,000 items in a little over 3 milliseconds—that’s about 3 microseconds per needle.

Besides the extremely fast membership test (thanks to the underlying hash table), the set and frozenset built-in types provide a rich selection of operations to create new sets or, in the case of set, to change existing ones. We will discuss the operations shortly, but first a note about syntax.

set Literals

The syntax of set literals—{1}, {1, 2}, etc.—looks exactly like the math notation, with one important exception: there’s no literal notation for the empty set, so we must remember to write set().

Syntax Quirk

Don’t forget: to create an empty set, you should use the constructor without an argument: set(). If you write {}, you’re creating an empty dict—this hasn’t changed.

In Python 3, the standard string representation of sets always uses the {...} notation, except for the empty set:

>>> s = {1}
>>> type(s)
<class 'set'>
>>> s
{1}
>>> s.pop()
1
>>> s
set()

Literal set syntax like {1, 2, 3} is both faster and more readable than calling the constructor (e.g., set([1, 2, 3])). The latter form is slower because, to evaluate it, Python has to look up the set name to fetch the constructor, then build a list, and finally pass it to the constructor. In contrast, to process a literal like {1, 2, 3}, Python runs a specialized BUILD_SET bytecode.

Comparing bytecodes for {1} and set([1])

Take a look at the bytecode for the two operations, as output by dis.dis (the disassembler function):

>>> from dis import dis
>>> dis('{1}')
  1           0 LOAD_CONST               0 (1)
              3 BUILD_SET                1
              6 RETURN_VALUE
>>> dis('set([1])')
  1           0 LOAD_NAME                0 (set)
              3 LOAD_CONST               0 (1)
              6 BUILD_LIST               1
              9 CALL_FUNCTION            1 (1 positional, 0 keyword pair)
             12 RETURN_VALUE

Disassemble bytecode for literal expression {1}.

Special BUILD_SET bytecode does almost all the work.

Bytecode for set([1]).

Three operations instead of BUILD_SET: LOAD_NAME, BUILD_LIST, and CALL_FUNCTION.

There is no special syntax to represent frozenset literals—they must be created by calling the constructor. The standard string representation in Python 3 looks like a frozenset constructor call. Note the output in the console session:

>>> frozenset(range(10))
frozenset({0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9})

Speaking of syntax, the familiar shape of listcomps was adapted to build sets as well.

Set Comprehensions

Set comprehensions (setcomps) were added in Python 2.7, together with the dictcomps that we saw in “dict Comprehensions”. Example 3-13 is a simple example.

Example 3-13. Build a set of Latin-1 characters that have the word “SIGN” in their Unicode names

>>> from unicodedata import name
>>> {chr(i) for i in range(32, 256) if 'SIGN' in name(chr(i),'')}
{'§', '=', '¢', '#', '¤', '<', '¥', 'µ', '×', '$', '¶', '£', '©',
'°', '+', '÷', '±', '>', '¬', '®', '%'}

Import name function from unicodedata to obtain character names.

Build set of characters with codes from 32 to 255 that have the word 'SIGN' in their names.

Syntax matters aside, let’s now review the rich assortment of operations provided by sets.

Set Operations

Figure 3-2 gives an overview of the methods you can expect from mutable and immutable sets. Many of them are special methods for operator overloading. Table 3-2 shows the math set operators that have corresponding operators or methods in Python. Note that some operators and methods perform in-place changes on the target set (e.g., &=, difference_update, etc.). Such operations make no sense in the ideal world of mathematical sets, and are not implemented in frozenset.

Figure 3-2. UML class diagram for MutableSet and its superclasses from collections.abc (names in italic are abstract classes and abstract methods; reverse operator methods omitted for brevity)

Tip

The infix operators in Table 3-2 require that both operands be sets, but all other methods take one or more iterable arguments. For example, to produce the union of four collections, a, b, c, and d, you can call a.union(b, c, d), where a must be a set, but b, c, and d can be iterables of any type.

Table 3-2. Mathematical set operations: these methods either produce a new set or update the target set in place, if it’s mutable

Math symbol
Python operator
Method
Description

S ∩ Z

s & z

s.__and__(z)

Intersection of s and z

z & s

s.__rand__(z)

Reversed & operator

s.intersection(it, …)

Intersection of s and all sets built from iterables it, etc.

s &= z

s.__iand__(z)

s updated with intersection of s and z

s.intersection_update(it, …)

s updated with intersection of s and all sets built from iterables it, etc.

S ∪ Z

s | z

s.__or__(z)

Union of s and z

z | s

s.__ror__(z)

Reversed |

s.union(it, …)

Union of s and all sets built from iterables it, etc.

s |= z

s.__ior__(z)

s updated with union of s and z

s.update(it, …)

s updated with union of s and all sets built from iterables it, etc.

S \ Z

s - z

s.__sub__(z)

Relative complement or difference between s and z

z - s

s.__rsub__(z)

Reversed - operator

s.difference(it, …)

Difference between s and all sets built from iterables it, etc.

s -= z

s.__isub__(z)

s updated with difference between s and z

s.difference_update(it, …)

s updated with difference between s and all sets built from iterables it, etc.

s.symmetric_difference(it)

Complement of s & set(it)

S ∆ Z

s ^ z

s.__xor__(z)

Symmetric difference (the complement of the intersection s & z)

z ^ s

s.__rxor__(z)

Reversed ^ operator

s.symmetric_difference_update(it, …)

s updated with symmetric difference of s and all sets built from iterables it, etc.

s ^= z

s.__ixor__(z)

s updated with symmetric difference of s and z

Warning

As I write this, there is a Python bug report—(issue 8743)—that says: “The set() operators (or, and, sub, xor, and their in-place counterparts) require that the parameter also be an instance of set().”, with the undesired side effect that these operators don’t work with collections.abc.Set subclasses. The bug is already fixed in trunk for Python 2.7 and 3.4, and should be history by the time you read this.

Table 3-3 lists set predicates: operators and methods that return True or False.

Table 3-3. Set comparison operators and methods that return a bool

Math symbol
Python operator
Method
Description

s.isdisjoint(z)

s and z are disjoint (have no elements in common)

e ∈ S

e in s

s.__contains__(e)

Element e is a member of s

S ⊆ Z

s <= z

s.__le__(z)

s is a subset of the z set

s.issubset(it)

s is a subset of the set built from the iterable it

S ⊂ Z

s < z

s.__lt__(z)

s is a proper subset of the z set

S ⊇ Z

s >= z

s.__ge__(z)

s is a superset of the z set

s.issuperset(it)

s is a superset of the set built from the iterable it

S ⊃ Z

s > z

s.__gt__(z)

s is a proper superset of the z set

In addition to the operators and methods derived from math set theory, the set types implement other methods of practical use, summarized in Table 3-4.

Table 3-4. Additional set methods

set
frozenset

s.add(e)

●

Add element e to s

s.clear()

●

Remove all elements of s

s.copy()

●

●

Shallow copy of s

s.discard(e)

●

Remove element e from s if it is present

s.__iter__()

●

●

Get iterator over s

s.__len__()

●

●

len(s)

s.pop()

●

Remove and return an element from s, raising KeyError if s is empty

s.remove(e)

●

Remove element e from s, raising KeyError if e not in s

This completes our overview of the features of sets.

We now change gears to discuss how dictionaries and sets are implemented with hash tables. After reading the rest of this chapter, you will no longer be surprised by the apparently unpredictable behavior sometimes exhibited by dict, set, and their brethren.

dict and set Under the Hood

Understanding how Python dictionaries and sets are implemented using hash tables is helpful to make sense of their strengths and limitations.

Here are some questions this section will answer:

How efficient are Python dict and set?

Why are they unordered?

Why can’t we use any Python object as a dict key or set element?

Why does the order of the dict keys or set elements depend on insertion order, and may change during the lifetime of the structure?

Why is it bad to add items to a dict or set while iterating through it?

To motivate the study of hash tables, we start by showcasing the amazing performance of dict and set with a simple test involving millions of items.

A Performance Experiment

From experience, all Pythonistas know that dicts and sets are fast. We’ll confirm that with a controlled experiment.

To see how the size of a dict, set, or list affects the performance of search using the in operator, I generated an array of 10 million distinct double-precision floats, the “haystack.” I then generated an array of needles: 1,000 floats, with 500 picked from the haystack and 500 verified not to be in it.

For the dict benchmark, I used dict.fromkeys() to create a dict named haystack with 1,000 floats. This was the setup for the dict test. The actual code I clocked with the timeit module is Example 3-14 (like Example 3-11).

Example 3-14. Search for needles in haystack and count those found

found = 0
for n in needles:
    if n in haystack:
        found += 1

The benchmark was repeated another four times, each time increasing tenfold the size of haystack, to reach a size of 10,000,000 in the last test. The result of the dict performance test is in Table 3-5.

Table 3-5. Total time for using in operator to search for 1,000 needles in haystack dicts of five sizes on a Core i7 laptop running Python 3.4.0 (tests timed the loop in Example 3-14)

len of haystack
Factor
dict time
Factor

1,000

1x

0.000202s

1.00x

10,000

10x

0.000140s

0.69x

100,000

100x

0.000228s

1.13x

1,000,000

1,000x

0.000290s

1.44x

10,000,000

10,000x

0.000337s

1.67x

In concrete terms, to check for the presence of 1,000 floating-point keys in a dictionary with 1,000 items, the processing time on my laptop was 0.000202s, and the same search in a dict with 10,000,000 items took 0.000337s. In other words, the time per search in the haystack with 10 million items was 0.337µs for each needle—yes, that is about one third of a microsecond per needle.

To compare, I repeated the benchmark, with the same haystacks of increasing size, but storing the haystack as a set or as list. For the set tests, in addition to timing the for loop in Example 3-14, I also timed the one-liner in Example 3-15, which produces the same result: count the number of elements from needles that are also in haystack.

Example 3-15. Use set intersection to count the needles that occur in haystack

found = len(needles & haystack)

Table 3-6 shows the tests side by side. The best times are in the “set& time” column, which displays results for the set & operator using the code from Example 3-15. The worst times are—as expected—in the “list time” column, because there is no hash table to support searches with the in operator on a list, so a full scan must be made, resulting in times that grow linearly with the size of the haystack.

Table 3-6. Total time for using in operator to search for 1,000 keys in haystacks of 5 sizes, stored as dicts, sets, and lists on a Core i7 laptop running Python 3.4.0 (tests timed the loop in Example 3-14 except the set&, which uses Example 3-15)

len of haystack
Factor
dict time
Factor
set time
Factor
set& time
Factor
list time
Factor

1,000

1x

0.000202s

1.00x

0.000143s

1.00x

0.000087s

1.00x

0.010556s

1.00x

10,000

10x

0.000140s

0.69x

0.000147s

1.03x

0.000092s

1.06x

0.086586s

8.20x

100,000

100x

0.000228s

1.13x

0.000241s

1.69x

0.000163s

1.87x

0.871560s

82.57x

1,000,000

1,000x

0.000290s

1.44x

0.000332s

2.32x

0.000250s

2.87x

9.189616s

870.56x

10,000,000

10,000x

0.000337s

1.67x

0.000387s

2.71x

0.000314s

3.61x

97.948056s

9,278.90x

If your program does any kind of I/O, the lookup time for keys in dicts or sets is negligible, regardless of the dict or set size (as long as it does fit in RAM). See the code used to generate Table 3-6 and accompanying discussion in Appendix A, Example A-1.

Now that we have concrete evidence of the speed of dicts and sets, let’s explore how that is achieved. The discussion of the hash table internals explains, for example, why the key ordering is apparently random and unstable.

Hash Tables in Dictionaries

This is a high-level view of how Python uses a hash table to implement a dict. Many details are omitted—the CPython code has some optimization tricks⁶—but the overall description is accurate.

Note

To simplify the ensuing presentation, we will focus on the internals of dict first, and later transfer the concepts to sets.

A hash table is a sparse array (i.e., an array that always has empty cells). In standard data structure texts, the cells in a hash table are often called “buckets.” In a dict hash table, there is a bucket for each item, and it contains two fields: a reference to the key and a reference to the value of the item. Because all buckets have the same size, access to an individual bucket is done by offset.

Python tries to keep at least 1/3 of the buckets empty; if the hash table becomes too crowded, it is copied to a new location with room for more buckets.

To put an item in a hash table, the first step is to calculate the hash value of the item key, which is done with the hash() built-in function, explained next.

Hashes and equality

The hash() built-in function works directly with built-in types and falls back to calling __hash__ for user-defined types. If two objects compare equal, their hash values must also be equal, otherwise the hash table algorithm does not work. For example, because 1 == 1.0 is true, hash(1) == hash(1.0) must also be true, even though the internal representation of an int and a float are very different.⁷

Also, to be effective as hash table indexes, hash values should scatter around the index space as much as possible. This means that, ideally, objects that are similar but not equal should have hash values that differ widely. Example 3-16 is the output of a script to compare the bit patterns of hash values. Note how the hashes of 1 and 1.0 are the same, but those of 1.0001, 1.0002, and 1.0003 are very different.

Example 3-16. Comparing hash bit patterns of 1, 1.0001, 1.0002, and 1.0003 on a 32-bit build of Python (bits that are different in the hashes above and below are highlighted with ! and the right column shows the number of bits that differ)

32-bit Python build
1        00000000000000000000000000000001
                                          != 0
1.0      00000000000000000000000000000001
------------------------------------------------
1.0      00000000000000000000000000000001
           ! !!! ! !! ! !    ! ! !! !!!   != 16
1.0001   00101110101101010000101011011101
------------------------------------------------
1.0001   00101110101101010000101011011101
          !!!  !!!! !!!!!   !!!!! !!  !   != 20
1.0002   01011101011010100001010110111001
------------------------------------------------
1.0002   01011101011010100001010110111001
          ! !   ! !!! ! !  !! ! !  ! !!!! != 17
1.0003   00001100000111110010000010010110
------------------------------------------------

The code to produce Example 3-16 is in Appendix A. Most of it deals with formatting the output, but it is listed as Example A-3 for completeness.

Note

Starting with Python 3.3, a random salt value is added to the hashes of str, bytes, and datetime objects. The salt value is constant within a Python process but varies between interpreter runs. The random salt is a security measure to prevent a DOS attack. Details are in a note in the documentation for the __hash__ special method.

With this basic understanding of object hashes, we are ready to dive into the algorithm that makes hash tables operate.

The hash table algorithm

To fetch the value at my_dict[search_key], Python calls hash(search_key) to obtain the hash value of search_key and uses the least significant bits of that number as an offset to look up a bucket in the hash table (the number of bits used depends on the current size of the table). If the found bucket is empty, KeyError is raised. Otherwise, the found bucket has an item—a found_key:found_value pair—and then Python checks whether search_key == found_key. If they match, that was the item sought: found_value is returned.

However, if search_key and found_key do not match, this is a hash collision. This happens because a hash function maps arbitrary objects to a small number of bits, and—in addition—the hash table is indexed with a subset of those bits. In order to resolve the collision, the algorithm then takes different bits in the hash, massages them in a particular way, and uses the result as an offset to look up a different bucket.⁸ If that is empty, KeyError is raised; if not, either the keys match and the item value is returned, or the collision resolution process is repeated. See Figure 3-3 for a diagram of this algorithm.

Figure 3-3. Flowchart for retrieving an item from a dict; given a key, this procedure either returns a value or raises KeyError

The process to insert or update an item is the same, except that when an empty bucket is located, the new item is put there, and when a bucket with a matching key is found, the value in that bucket is overwritten with the new value.

Additionally, when inserting items, Python may determine that the hash table is too crowded and rebuild it to a new location with more room. As the hash table grows, so does the number of hash bits used as bucket offsets, and this keeps the rate of collisions low.

This implementation may seem like a lot of work, but even with millions of items in a dict, many searches happen with no collisions, and the average number of collisions per search is between one and two. Under normal usage, even the unluckiest keys can be found after a handful of collisions are resolved.

Knowing the internals of the dict implementation we can explain the strengths and limitations of this data structure and all the others derived from it in Python. We are now ready to consider why Python dicts behave as they do.

Practical Consequences of How dict Works

In the following subsections, we’ll discuss the limitations and benefits that the underlying hash table implementation brings to dict usage.

Keys must be hashable objects

An object is hashable if all of these requirements are met:

It supports the hash() function via a __hash__() method that always returns the same value over the lifetime of the object.

It supports equality via an __eq__() method.

If a == b is True then hash(a) == hash(b) must also be True.

User-defined types are hashable by default because their hash value is their id() and they all compare not equal.

Warning

If you implement a class with a custom __eq__ method, and you want the instances to be hashable, you must also implement a suitable __hash__, to make sure that when a == b is True then hash(a) == hash(b) is also True. Otherwise you are breaking an invariant of the hash table algorithm, with the grave consequence that dicts and sets will not handle your objects reliably. On the other hand, if a class has a custom __eq$__ that depends on mutable state, its instances are not hashable and you must never implement a __hash__ method in such a class.

dicts have significant memory overhead

Because a dict uses a hash table internally, and hash tables must be sparse to work, they are not space efficient. For example, if you are handling a large quantity of records, it makes sense to store them in a list of tuples or named tuples instead of using a list of dictionaries in JSON style, with one dict per record. Replacing dicts with tuples reduces the memory usage in two ways: by removing the overhead of one hash table per record and by not storing the field names again with each record.

For user-defined types, the __slots__ class attribute changes the storage of instance attributes from a dict to a tuple in each instance. This will be discussed in “Saving Space with the __slots__ Class Attribute” (Chapter 9).

Keep in mind we are talking about space optimizations. If you are dealing with a few million objects and your machine has gigabytes of RAM, you should postpone such optimizations until they are actually warranted. Optimization is the altar where maintainability is sacrificed.

Key search is very fast

The dict implementation is an example of trading space for time: dictionaries have significant memory overhead, but they provide fast access regardless of the size of the dictionary—as long as it fits in memory. As Table 3-5 shows, when we increased the size of a dict from 1,000 to 10,000,000 elements, the time to search grew by a factor of 2.8, from 0.000163s to 0.000456s. The latter figure means we could search more than 2 million keys per second in a dict with 10 million items.

Key ordering depends on insertion order

When a hash collision happens, the second key ends up in a position that it would not normally occupy if it had been inserted first. So, a dict built as dict([(key1, value1), (key2, value2)]) compares equal to dict([(key2, value2), (key1, value1)]), but their key ordering may not be the same if the hashes of key1 and key2 collide.

Example 3-17 demonstrates the effect of loading three dicts with the same data, just in different order. The resulting dictionaries all compare equal, even if their order is not the same.

Example 3-17. dialcodes.py fills three dictionaries with the same data sorted in different ways

# dial codes of the top 10 most populous countries
DIAL_CODES = [
        (86, 'China'),
        (91, 'India'),
        (1, 'United States'),
        (62, 'Indonesia'),
        (55, 'Brazil'),
        (92, 'Pakistan'),
        (880, 'Bangladesh'),
        (234, 'Nigeria'),
        (7, 'Russia'),
        (81, 'Japan'),
    ]

d1 = dict(DIAL_CODES)
print('d1:', d1.keys())
d2 = dict(sorted(DIAL_CODES))
print('d2:', d2.keys())
d3 = dict(sorted(DIAL_CODES, key=lambda x:x[1]))
print('d3:', d3.keys())
assert d1 == d2 and d2 == d3

d1: built from the tuples in descending order of country population.

d2: filled with tuples sorted by dial code.

d3: loaded with tuples sorted by country name.

The dictionaries compare equal, because they hold the same key:value pairs.

Example 3-18 shows the output.

Example 3-18. Output from dialcodes.py shows three distinct key orderings

d1: dict_keys([880, 1, 86, 55, 7, 234, 91, 92, 62, 81])
d2: dict_keys([880, 1, 91, 86, 81, 55, 234, 7, 92, 62])
d3: dict_keys([880, 81, 1, 86, 55, 7, 234, 91, 92, 62])

Adding items to a dict may change the order of existing keys

Whenever you add a new item to a dict, the Python interpreter may decide that the hash table of that dictionary needs to grow. This entails building a new, bigger hash table, and adding all current items to the new table. During this process, new (but different) hash collisions may happen, with the result that the keys are likely to be ordered differently in the new hash table. All of this is implementation-dependent, so you cannot reliably predict when it will happen. If you are iterating over the dictionary keys and changing them at the same time, your loop may not scan all the items as expected—not even the items that were already in the dictionary before you added to it.

This is why modifying the contents of a dict while iterating through it is a bad idea. If you need to scan and add items to a dictionary, do it in two steps: read the dict from start to finish and collect the needed additions in a second dict. Then update the first one with it.

Tip

In Python 3, the .keys(), .items(), and .values() methods return dictionary views, which behave more like sets than the lists returned by these methods in Python 2. Such views are also dynamic: they do not replicate the contents of the dict, and they immediately reflect any changes to the dict.

We can now apply what we know about hash tables to sets.

How Sets Work—Practical Consequences

The set and frozenset types are also implemented with a hash table, except that each bucket holds only a reference to the element (as if it were a key in a dict, but without a value to go with it). In fact, before set was added to the language, we often used dictionaries with dummy values just to perform fast membership tests on the keys.

Everything said in “Practical Consequences of How dict Works” about how the underlying hash table determines the behavior of a dict applies to a set. Without repeating the previous section, we can summarize it for sets with just a few words:

Set elements must be hashable objects.

Sets have a significant memory overhead.

Membership testing is very efficient.

Element ordering depends on insertion order.

Adding elements to a set may change the order of other elements.

Chapter Summary

Dictionaries are a keystone of Python. Beyond the basic dict, the standard library offers handy, ready-to-use specialized mappings like defaultdict, OrderedDict, ChainMap, and Counter, all defined in the collections module. The same module also provides the easy-to-extend UserDict class.

Two powerful methods available in most mappings are setdefault and update. The setdefault method is used to update items holding mutable values, for example, in a dict of list values, to avoid redundant searches for the same key. The update method allows bulk insertion or overwriting of items from any other mapping, from iterables providing (key, value) pairs and from keyword arguments. Mapping constructors also use update internally, allowing instances to be initialized from mappings, iterables, or keyword arguments.

A clever hook in the mapping API is the __missing__ method, which lets you customize what happens when a key is not found.

The collections.abc module provides the Mapping and MutableMapping abstract base classes for reference and type checking. The little-known MappingProxyType from the types module creates immutable mappings. There are also ABCs for Set and MutableSet.

The hash table implementation underlying dict and set is extremely fast. Understanding its logic explains why items are apparently unordered and may even be reordered behind our backs. There is a price to pay for all this speed, and the price is in memory.

Further Reading

In The Python Standard Library, 8.3. collections — Container datatypes includes examples and practical recipes with several mapping types. The Python source code for the module Lib/collections/__init__.py is a great reference for anyone who wants to create a new mapping type or grok the logic of the existing ones.

Chapter 1 of Python Cookbook, Third edition (O’Reilly) by David Beazley and Brian K. Jones has 20 handy and insightful recipes with data structures—the majority using dict in clever ways.

Written by A.M. Kuchling—a Python core contributor and author of many pages of the official Python docs and how-tos—Chapter 18, “Python’s Dictionary Implementation: Being All Things to All People,” in the book Beautiful Code (O’Reilly) includes a detailed explanation of the inner workings of the Python dict. Also, there are lots of comments in the source code of the dictobject.c CPython module. Brandon Craig Rhodes’ presentation The Mighty Dictionary is excellent and shows how hash tables work by using lots of slides with… tables!

The rationale for adding sets to the language is documented in PEP 218 — Adding a Built-In Set Object Type. When PEP 218 was approved, no special literal syntax was adopted for sets. The set literals were created for Python 3 and backported to Python 2.7, along with dict and set comprehensions. PEP 274 — Dict Comprehensions is the birth certificate of dictcomps. I could not find a PEP for setcomps; apparently they were adopted because they get along well with their siblings—a jolly good reason.

Soapbox

My friend Geraldo Cohen once remarked that Python is “simple and correct.”

The dict type is an example of simplicity and correctness. It’s highly optimized to do one thing well: retrieve arbitrary keys. It’s fast and robust enough to be used all over the Python interpreter itself. If you need predictable ordering, use OrderedDict. That is not a requirement in most uses of mappings, so it makes sense to keep the core implementation simple and offer variations in the standard library.

Contrast with PHP, where arrays are described like this in the official PHP Manual:

An array in PHP is actually an ordered map. A map is a type that associates values to keys. This type is optimized for several different uses; it can be treated as an array, list (vector), hash table (an implementation of a map), dictionary, collection, stack, queue, and probably more.

From that description, I don’t know what is the real cost of using PHP’s list/OrderedDict hybrid.

The goal of this and the previous chapter in this book was to showcase the Python collection types optimized for particular uses. I made the point that beyond the trusty list and dict there are specialized alternatives for different use cases.

Before finding Python, I had done web programming using Perl, PHP, and JavaScript. I really enjoyed having a literal syntax for mappings in these languages, and I badly miss it whenever I have to use Java or C. A good literal syntax for mappings makes it easy to do configuration, table-driven implementations, and to hold data for prototyping and testing. The lack of it pushed the Java community to adopt the verbose and overly complex XML as a data format.

JSON was proposed as “The Fat-Free Alternative to XML” and became a huge success, replacing XML in many contexts. A concise syntax for lists and dictionaries makes an excellent data interchange format.

PHP and Ruby imitated the hash syntax from Perl, using => to link keys to values. JavaScript followed the lead of Python and uses :. Of course, JSON came from JavaScript, but it also happens to be an almost exact subset of Python syntax. JSON is compatible with Python except for the spelling of the values true, false, and null. The syntax everybody now uses for exchanging data is the Python dict and list syntax.

Simple and correct.

¹ Chapter 18 of Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think, edited by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson (O’Reilly, 2007).

² The original script appears in slide 41 of Martelli’s “Re-learning Python” presentation. His script is actually a demonstration of dict.setdefault, as shown in our Example 3-4.

³ This is an example of using a method as a first-class function, the subject of Chapter 5.

⁴ The exact problem with subclassing dict and other built-ins is covered in “Subclassing Built-In Types Is Tricky”.

⁵ We are not actually using MappingProxyType in Pingo.io because it is new in Python 3.3 and we need to support Python 2.7 at this time.

⁶ The source code for the CPython dictobject.c module is rich in comments. See also the reference for the Beautiful Code book in “Further Reading”.

⁷ Because we just mentioned int, here is a CPython implementation detail: the hash value of an int that fits in a machine word is the value of the int itself.

⁸ The C function that shuffles the hash bits in case of collision has a curious name: perturb. For all the details, see dictobject.c in the CPython source code.

Chapter 4. Text versus Bytes

Humans use text. Computers speak bytes.¹

Esther Nam and Travis Fischer, Character Encoding and Unicode in Python

Python 3 introduced a sharp distinction between strings of human text and sequences of raw bytes. Implicit conversion of byte sequences to Unicode text is a thing of the past. This chapter deals with Unicode strings, binary sequences, and the encodings used to convert between them.

Depending on your Python programming context, a deeper understanding of Unicode may or may not be of vital importance to you. In the end, most of the issues covered in this chapter do not affect programmers who deal only with ASCII text. But even if that is your case, there is no escaping the str versus byte divide. As a bonus, you’ll find that the specialized binary sequence types provide features that the “all-purpose” Python 2 str type does not have.

In this chapter, we will visit the following topics:

Characters, code points, and byte representations

Unique features of binary sequences: bytes, bytearray, and memoryview

Codecs for full Unicode and legacy character sets

Avoiding and dealing with encoding errors

Best practices when handling text files

The default encoding trap and standard I/O issues

Safe Unicode text comparisons with normalization

Utility functions for normalization, case folding, and brute-force diacritic removal

Proper sorting of Unicode text with locale and the PyUCA library

Character metadata in the Unicode database

Dual-mode APIs that handle str and bytes

Let’s start with the characters, code points, and bytes.

Character Issues

The concept of “string” is simple enough: a string is a sequence of characters. The problem lies in the definition of “character.”

In 2015, the best definition of “character” we have is a Unicode character. Accordingly, the items you get out of a Python 3 str are Unicode characters, just like the items of a unicode object in Python 2—and not the raw bytes you get from a Python 2 str.

The Unicode standard explicitly separates the identity of characters from specific byte representations:

The identity of a character—its code point—is a number from 0 to 1,114,111 (base 10), shown in the Unicode standard as 4 to 6 hexadecimal digits with a “U+” prefix. For example, the code point for the letter A is U+0041, the Euro sign is U+20AC, and the musical symbol G clef is assigned to code point U+1D11E. About 10% of the valid code points have characters assigned to them in Unicode 6.3, the standard used in Python 3.4.

The actual bytes that represent a character depend on the encoding in use. An encoding is an algorithm that converts code points to byte sequences and vice versa. The code point for A (U+0041) is encoded as the single byte \x41 in the UTF-8 encoding, or as the bytes \x41\x00 in UTF-16LE encoding. As another example, the Euro sign (U+20AC) becomes three bytes in UTF-8—\xe2\x82\xac—but in UTF-16LE it is encoded as two bytes: \xac\x20.

Converting from code points to bytes is encoding; converting from bytes to code points is decoding. See Example 4-1.

Example 4-1. Encoding and decoding

>>> s = 'café'
>>> len(s)
4
>>> b = s.encode('utf8')
>>> b
b'caf\xc3\xa9'
>>> len(b)
5
>>> b.decode('utf8')
'café'

The str 'café' has four Unicode characters.

Encode str to bytes using UTF-8 encoding.

bytes literals start with a b prefix.

bytes b has five bytes (the code point for “é” is encoded as two bytes in UTF-8).

Decode bytes to str using UTF-8 encoding.

Tip

If you need a memory aid to help distinguish .decode() from .encode(), convince yourself that byte sequences can be cryptic machine core dumps while Unicode str objects are “human” text. Therefore, it makes sense that we decode bytes to str to get human-readable text, and we encode str to bytes for storage or transmission.

Although the Python 3 str is pretty much the Python 2 unicode type with a new name, the Python 3 bytes is not simply the old str renamed, and there is also the closely related bytearray type. So it is worthwhile to take a look at the binary sequence types before advancing to encoding/decoding issues.

Byte Essentials

The new binary sequence types are unlike the Python 2 str in many regards. The first thing to know is that there are two basic built-in types for binary sequences: the immutable bytes type introduced in Python 3 and the mutable bytearray, added in Python 2.6. (Python 2.6 also introduced bytes, but it’s just an alias to the str type, and does not behave like the Python 3 bytes type.)

Each item in bytes or bytearray is an integer from 0 to 255, and not a one-character string like in the Python 2 str. However, a slice of a binary sequence always produces a binary sequence of the same type—including slices of length 1. See Example 4-2.

Example 4-2. A five-byte sequence as bytes and as bytearray

>>> cafe = bytes('café', encoding='utf_8')
>>> cafe
b'caf\xc3\xa9'
>>> cafe[0]
99
>>> cafe[:1]
b'c'
>>> cafe_arr = bytearray(cafe)
>>> cafe_arr
bytearray(b'caf\xc3\xa9')
>>> cafe_arr[-1:]
bytearray(b'\xa9')

bytes can be built from a str, given an encoding.

Each item is an integer in range(256).

Slices of bytes are also bytes—even slices of a single byte.

There is no literal syntax for bytearray: they are shown as bytearray() with a bytes literal as argument.

A slice of bytearray is also a bytearray.

Note

The fact that my_bytes[0] retrieves an int but my_bytes[:1] returns a bytes object of length 1 should not be surprising. The only sequence type where s[0] == s[:1] is the str type. Although practical, this behavior of str is exceptional. For every other sequence, s[i] returns one item, and s[i:i+1] returns a sequence of the same type with the s[i] item inside it.

Although binary sequences are really sequences of integers, their literal notation reflects the fact that ASCII text is often embedded in them. Therefore, three different displays are used, depending on each byte value:

For bytes in the printable ASCII range—from space to ~—the ASCII character itself is used.

For bytes corresponding to tab, newline, carriage return, and \, the escape sequences \t, \n, \r, and \\ are used.

For every other byte value, a hexadecimal escape sequence is used (e.g., \x00 is the null byte).

That is why in Example 4-2 you see b'caf\xc3\xa9': the first three bytes b'caf' are in the printable ASCII range, the last two are not.

Both bytes and bytearray support every str method except those that do formatting (format, format_map) and a few others that depend on Unicode data, including casefold, isdecimal, isidentifier, isnumeric, isprintable, and encode. This means that you can use familiar string methods like endswith, replace, strip, translate, upper, and dozens of others with binary sequences—only using bytes and not str arguments. In addition, the regular expression functions in the re module also work on binary sequences, if the regex is compiled from a binary sequence instead of a str. The % operator does not work with binary sequences in Python 3.0 to 3.4, but should be supported in version 3.5 according to PEP 461 — Adding % formatting to bytes and bytearray.

Binary sequences have a class method that str doesn’t have, called fromhex, which builds a binary sequence by parsing pairs of hex digits optionally separated by spaces:

>>> bytes.fromhex('31 4B CE A9')
b'1K\xce\xa9'

The other ways of building bytes or bytearray instances are calling their constructors with:

A str and an encoding keyword argument.

An iterable providing items with values from 0 to 255.

A single integer, to create a binary sequence of that size initialized with null bytes. (This signature will be deprecated in Python 3.5 and removed in Python 3.6. See PEP 467 — Minor API improvements for binary sequences.)

An object that implements the buffer protocol (e.g., bytes, bytearray, memoryview, array.array); this copies the bytes from the source object to the newly created binary sequence.

Building a binary sequence from a buffer-like object is a low-level operation that may involve type casting. See a demonstration in Example 4-3.

Example 4-3. Initializing bytes from the raw data of an array

>>> import array
>>> numbers = array.array('h', [-2, -1, 0, 1, 2])
>>> octets = bytes(numbers)
>>> octets
b'\xfe\xff\xff\xff\x00\x00\x01\x00\x02\x00'

Typecode 'h' creates an array of short integers (16 bits).

octets holds a copy of the bytes that make up numbers.

These are the 10 bytes that represent the five short integers.

Creating a bytes or bytearray object from any buffer-like source will always copy the bytes. In contrast, memoryview objects let you share memory between binary data structures. To extract structured information from binary sequences, the struct module is invaluable. We’ll see it working along with bytes and memoryview in the next section.

Structs and Memory Views

The struct module provides functions to parse packed bytes into a tuple of fields of different types and to perform the opposite conversion, from a tuple into packed bytes. struct is used with bytes, bytearray, and memoryview objects.

As we’ve seen in “Memory Views”, the memoryview class does not let you create or store byte sequences, but provides shared memory access to slices of data from other binary sequences, packed arrays, and buffers such as Python Imaging Library (PIL) images,² without copying the bytes.

Example 4-4 shows the use of memoryview and struct together to extract the width and height of a GIF image.

Example 4-4. Using memoryview and struct to inspect a GIF image header

>>> import struct
>>> fmt = '<3s3sHH'
>>> with open('filter.gif', 'rb') as fp:
...     img = memoryview(fp.read())
...
>>> header = img[:10]
>>> bytes(header)
b'GIF89a+\x02\xe6\x00'
>>> struct.unpack(fmt, header)
(b'GIF', b'89a', 555, 230)
>>> del header
>>> del img

struct format: < little-endian; 3s3s two sequences of 3 bytes; HH two 16-bit integers.

Create memoryview from file contents in memory…

…then another memoryview by slicing the first one; no bytes are copied here.

Convert to bytes for display only; 10 bytes are copied here.

Unpack memoryview into tuple of: type, version, width, and height.

Delete references to release the memory associated with the memoryview instances.

Note that slicing a memoryview returns a new memoryview, without copying bytes (Leonardo Rochael—one of the technical reviewers—pointed out that even less byte copying would happen if I used the mmap module to open the image as a memory-mapped file. I will not cover mmap in this book, but if you read and change binary files frequently, learning more about mmap — Memory-mapped file support will be very fruitful).

We will not go deeper into memoryview or the struct module in this book, but if you work with binary data, you’ll find it worthwhile to study their docs: Built-in Types » Memory Views and struct — Interpret bytes as packed binary data.

After this brief exploration of binary sequence types in Python, let’s see how they are converted to/from strings.

Basic Encoders/Decoders

The Python distribution bundles more than 100 codecs (encoder/decoder) for text to byte conversion and vice versa. Each codec has a name, like 'utf_8', and often aliases, such as 'utf8', 'utf-8', and 'U8', which you can use as the encoding argument in functions like open(), str.encode(), bytes.decode(), and so on. Example 4-5 shows the same text encoded as three different byte sequences.

Example 4-5. The string “El Niño” encoded with three codecs producing very different byte sequences

>>> for codec in ['latin_1', 'utf_8', 'utf_16']:
...     print(codec, 'El Niño'.encode(codec), sep='\t')
...
latin_1 b'El Ni\xf1o'
utf_8   b'El Ni\xc3\xb1o'
utf_16  b'\xff\xfeE\x00l\x00 \x00N\x00i\x00\xf1\x00o\x00'

Figure 4-1 demonstrates a variety of codecs generating bytes from characters like the letter “A” through the G-clef musical symbol. Note that the last three encodings are variable-length, multibyte encodings.

Figure 4-1. Twelve characters, their code points, and their byte representation (in hex) in seven different encodings (asterisks indicate that the character cannot be represented in that encoding)

All those asterisks in Figure 4-1 make clear that some encodings, like ASCII and even the multibyte GB2312, cannot represent every Unicode character. The UTF encodings, however, are designed to handle every Unicode code point.

The encodings shown in Figure 4-1 were chosen as a representative sample:

latin1 a.k.a. iso8859_1

Important because it is the basis for other encodings, such as cp1252 and Unicode itself (note how the latin1 byte values appear in the cp1252 bytes and even in the code points).

cp1252

A latin1 superset by Microsoft, adding useful symbols like curly quotes and the € (euro); some Windows apps call it “ANSI,” but it was never a real ANSI standard.

cp437

The original character set of the IBM PC, with box drawing characters. Incompatible with latin1, which appeared later.

gb2312

Legacy standard to encode the simplified Chinese ideographs used in mainland China; one of several widely deployed multibyte encodings for Asian languages.

utf-8

The most common 8-bit encoding on the Web, by far;³ backward-compatible with ASCII (pure ASCII text is valid UTF-8).

utf-16le

One form of the UTF-16 16-bit encoding scheme; all UTF-16 encodings support code points beyond U+FFFF through escape sequences called “surrogate pairs.”

Warning

UTF-16 superseded the original 16-bit Unicode 1.0 encoding—UCS-2—way back in 1996. UCS-2 is still deployed in many systems, but it only supports code points up to U+FFFF. As of Unicode 6.3, more than 50% of the allocated code points are above U+10000, including the increasingly popular emoji pictographs.

With this overview of common encodings now complete, we move to handling issues in encoding and decoding operations.

Understanding Encode/Decode Problems

Although there is a generic UnicodeError exception, the error reported is almost always more specific: either a UnicodeEncodeError (when converting str to binary sequences) or a UnicodeDecodeError (when reading binary sequences into str). Loading Python modules may also generate a SyntaxError when the source encoding is unexpected. We’ll show how to handle all of these errors in the next sections.

Tip

The first thing to note when you get a Unicode error is the exact type of the exception. Is it a UnicodeEncodeError, a UnicodeDecodeError, or some other error (e.g., SyntaxError) that mentions an encoding problem? To solve the problem, you have to understand it first.

Coping with UnicodeEncodeError

Most non-UTF codecs handle only a small subset of the Unicode characters. When converting text to bytes, if a character is not defined in the target encoding, UnicodeEncodeError will be raised, unless special handling is provided by passing an errors argument to the encoding method or function. The behavior of the error handlers is shown in Example 4-6.

Example 4-6. Encoding to bytes: success and error handling

>>> city = 'São Paulo'
>>> city.encode('utf_8')
b'S\xc3\xa3o Paulo'
>>> city.encode('utf_16')
b'\xff\xfeS\x00\xe3\x00o\x00 \x00P\x00a\x00u\x00l\x00o\x00'
>>> city.encode('iso8859_1')
b'S\xe3o Paulo'
>>> city.encode('cp437')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/.../lib/python3.4/encodings/cp437.py", line 12, in encode
    return codecs.charmap_encode(input,errors,encoding_map)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\xe3' in
position 1: character maps to <undefined>
>>> city.encode('cp437', errors='ignore')
b'So Paulo'
>>> city.encode('cp437', errors='replace')
b'S?o Paulo'
>>> city.encode('cp437', errors='xmlcharrefreplace')
b'S&#227;o Paulo'

The 'utf_?' encodings handle any str.

'iso8859_1' also works for the 'São Paulo' str.

'cp437' can’t encode the 'ã' (“a” with tilde). The default error handler—'strict'—raises UnicodeEncodeError.

The error='ignore' handler silently skips characters that cannot be encoded; this is usually a very bad idea.

When encoding, error='replace' substitutes unencodable characters with '?'; data is lost, but users will know something is amiss.

'xmlcharrefreplace' replaces unencodable characters with an XML entity.

Note

The codecs error handling is extensible. You may register extra strings for the errors argument by passing a name and an error handling function to the codecs.register_error function. See the codecs.register_error documentation.

Coping with UnicodeDecodeError

Not every byte holds a valid ASCII character, and not every byte sequence is valid UTF-8 or UTF-16; therefore, when you assume one of these encodings while converting a binary sequence to text, you will get a UnicodeDecodeError if unexpected bytes are found.

On the other hand, many legacy 8-bit encodings like 'cp1252', 'iso8859_1', and 'koi8_r' are able to decode any stream of bytes, including random noise, without generating errors. Therefore, if your program assumes the wrong 8-bit encoding, it will silently decode garbage.

Tip

Garbled characters are known as gremlins or mojibake (文字化け—Japanese for “transformed text”).

Example 4-7 illustrates how using the wrong codec may produce gremlins or a UnicodeDecodeError.

Example 4-7. Decoding from str to bytes: success and error handling

>>> octets = b'Montr\xe9al'
>>> octets.decode('cp1252')
'Montréal'
>>> octets.decode('iso8859_7')
'Montrιal'
>>> octets.decode('koi8_r')
'MontrИal'
>>> octets.decode('utf_8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 5:
invalid continuation byte
>>> octets.decode('utf_8', errors='replace')
'Montr�al'

These bytes are the characters for “Montréal” encoded as latin1; '\xe9' is the byte for “é”.

Decoding with 'cp1252' (Windows 1252) works because it is a proper superset of latin1.

ISO-8859-7 is intended for Greek, so the '\xe9' byte is misinterpreted, and no error is issued.

KOI8-R is for Russian. Now '\xe9' stands for the Cyrillic letter “И”.

The 'utf_8' codec detects that octets is not valid UTF-8, and raises UnicodeDecodeError.

Using 'replace' error handling, the \xe9 is replaced by “�” (code point U+FFFD), the official Unicode REPLACEMENT CHARACTER intended to represent unknown characters.

SyntaxError When Loading Modules with Unexpected Encoding

UTF-8 is the default source encoding for Python 3, just as ASCII was the default for Python 2 (starting with 2.5). If you load a .py module containing non-UTF-8 data and no encoding declaration, you get a message like this:

SyntaxError: Non-UTF-8 code starting with '\xe1' in file ola.py on line
  1, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/
  for details

Because UTF-8 is widely deployed in GNU/Linux and OSX systems, a likely scenario is opening a .py file created on Windows with cp1252. Note that this error happens even in Python for Windows, because the default encoding for Python 3 is UTF-8 across all platforms.

To fix this problem, add a magic coding comment at the top of the file, as shown in Example 4-8.

Example 4-8. ola.py: “Hello, World!” in Portuguese

# coding: cp1252

print('Olá, Mundo!')

Tip

Now that Python 3 source code is no longer limited to ASCII and defaults to the excellent UTF-8 encoding, the best “fix” for source code in legacy encodings like 'cp1252' is to convert them to UTF-8 already, and not bother with the coding comments. If your editor does not support UTF-8, it’s time to switch.

Non-ASCII Names in Source Code: Should You Use Them?

Python 3 allows non-ASCII identifiers in source code:

>>> ação = 'PBR'  # ação = stock
>>> ε = 10**-6    # ε = epsilon

Some people dislike the idea. The most common argument to stick with ASCII identifiers is to make it easy for everyone to read and edit code. That argument misses the point: you want your source code to be readable and editable by its intended audience, and that may not be “everyone.” If the code belongs to a multinational corporation or is open source and you want contributors from around the world, the identifiers should be in English, and then all you need is ASCII.

But if you are a teacher in Brazil, your students will find it easier to read code that uses Portuguese variable and function names, correctly spelled. And they will have no difficulty typing the cedillas and accented vowels on their localized keyboards.

Now that Python can parse Unicode names and UTF-8 is the default source encoding, I see no point in coding identifiers in Portuguese without accents, as we used to do in Python 2 out of necessity—unless you need the code to run on Python 2 also. If the names are in Portuguese, leaving out the accents won’t make the code more readable to anyone.

This is my point of view as a Portuguese-speaking Brazilian, but I believe it applies across borders and cultures: choose the human language that makes the code easier to read by the team, then use the characters needed for correct spelling.

Suppose you have a text file, be it source code or poetry, but you don’t know its encoding. How do you detect the actual encoding? The next section answers that with a library recommendation.

How to Discover the Encoding of a Byte Sequence

How do you find the encoding of a byte sequence? Short answer: you can’t. You must be told.

Some communication protocols and file formats, like HTTP and XML, contain headers that explicitly tell us how the content is encoded. You can be sure that some byte streams are not ASCII because they contain byte values over 127, and the way UTF-8 and UTF-16 are built also limits the possible byte sequences. But even then, you can never be 100% positive that a binary file is ASCII or UTF-8 just because certain bit patterns are not there.

However, considering that human languages also have their rules and restrictions, once you assume that a stream of bytes is human plain text it may be possible to sniff out its encoding using heuristics and statistics. For example, if b'\x00' bytes are common, it is probably a 16- or 32-bit encoding, and not an 8-bit scheme, because null characters in plain text are bugs; when the byte sequence b'\x20\x00' appears often, it is likely to be the space character (U+0020) in a UTF-16LE encoding, rather than the obscure U+2000 EN QUAD character—whatever that is.

That is how the package Chardet — The Universal Character Encoding Detector works to identify one of 30 supported encodings. Chardet is a Python library that you can use in your programs, but also includes a command-line utility, chardetect. Here is what it reports on the source file for this chapter:

$ chardetect 04-text-byte.asciidoc
04-text-byte.asciidoc: utf-8 with confidence 0.99

Although binary sequences of encoded text usually don’t carry explicit hints of their encoding, the UTF formats may prepend a byte order mark to the textual content. That is explained next.

BOM: A Useful Gremlin

In Example 4-5, you may have noticed a couple of extra bytes at the beginning of a UTF-16 encoded sequence. Here they are again:

>>> u16 = 'El Niño'.encode('utf_16')
>>> u16
b'\xff\xfeE\x00l\x00 \x00N\x00i\x00\xf1\x00o\x00'

The bytes are b'\xff\xfe'. That is a BOM—byte-order mark—denoting the “little-endian” byte ordering of the Intel CPU where the encoding was performed.

On a little-endian machine, for each code point the least significant byte comes first: the letter 'E', code point U+0045 (decimal 69), is encoded in byte offsets 2 and 3 as 69 and 0:

>>> list(u16)
[255, 254, 69, 0, 108, 0, 32, 0, 78, 0, 105, 0, 241, 0, 111, 0]

On a big-endian CPU, the encoding would be reversed; 'E' would be encoded as 0 and 69.

To avoid confusion, the UTF-16 encoding prepends the text to be encoded with the special character ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE (U+FEFF), which is invisible. On a little-endian system, that is encoded as b'\xff\xfe' (decimal 255, 254). Because, by design, there is no U+FFFE character, the byte sequence b'\xff\xfe' must mean the ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE on a little-endian encoding, so the codec knows which byte ordering to use.

There is a variant of UTF-16—UTF-16LE—that is explicitly little-endian, and another one explicitly big-endian, UTF-16BE. If you use them, a BOM is not generated:

>>> u16le = 'El Niño'.encode('utf_16le')
>>> list(u16le)
[69, 0, 108, 0, 32, 0, 78, 0, 105, 0, 241, 0, 111, 0]
>>> u16be = 'El Niño'.encode('utf_16be')
>>> list(u16be)
[0, 69, 0, 108, 0, 32, 0, 78, 0, 105, 0, 241, 0, 111]

If present, the BOM is supposed to be filtered by the UTF-16 codec, so that you only get the actual text contents of the file without the leading ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE. The standard says that if a file is UTF-16 and has no BOM, it should be assumed to be UTF-16BE (big-endian). However, the Intel x86 architecture is little-endian, so there is plenty of little-endian UTF-16 with no BOM in the wild.

This whole issue of endianness only affects encodings that use words of more than one byte, like UTF-16 and UTF-32. One big advantage of UTF-8 is that it produces the same byte sequence regardless of machine endianness, so no BOM is needed. Nevertheless, some Windows applications (notably Notepad) add the BOM to UTF-8 files anyway—and Excel depends on the BOM to detect a UTF-8 file, otherwise it assumes the content is encoded with a Windows codepage. The character U+FEFF encoded in UTF-8 is the three-byte sequence b'\xef\xbb\xbf'. So if a file starts with those three bytes, it is likely to be a UTF-8 file with a BOM. However, Python does not automatically assume a file is UTF-8 just because it starts with b'\xef\xbb\xbf'.

We now move on to handling text files in Python 3.

Handling Text Files

The best practice for handling text is the “Unicode sandwich” (Figure 4-2).⁴ This means that bytes should be decoded to str as early as possible on input (e.g., when opening a file for reading). The “meat” of the sandwich is the business logic of your program, where text handling is done exclusively on str objects. You should never be encoding or decoding in the middle of other processing. On output, the str are encoded to bytes as late as possible. Most web frameworks work like that, and we rarely touch bytes when using them. In Django, for example, your views should output Unicode str; Django itself takes care of encoding the response to bytes, using UTF-8 by default.

Figure 4-2. Unicode sandwich: current best practice for text processing

Python 3 makes it easier to follow the advice of the Unicode sandwich, because the open built-in does the necessary decoding when reading and encoding when writing files in text mode, so all you get from my_file.read() and pass to my_file.write(text) are str objects.⁵

Therefore, using text files is simple. But if you rely on default encodings you will get bitten.

Consider the console session in Example 4-9. Can you spot the bug?

Example 4-9. A platform encoding issue (if you try this on your machine, you may or may not see the problem)

>>> open('cafe.txt', 'w', encoding='utf_8').write('café')
4
>>> open('cafe.txt').read()
'cafÃ©'

The bug: I specified UTF-8 encoding when writing the file but failed to do so when reading it, so Python assumed the system default encoding—Windows 1252—and the trailing bytes in the file were decoded as characters 'Ã©' instead of 'é'.

I ran Example 4-9 on a Windows 7 machine. The same statements running on recent GNU/Linux or Mac OSX work perfectly well because their default encoding is UTF-8, giving the false impression that everything is fine. If the encoding argument was omitted when opening the file to write, the locale default encoding would be used, and we’d read the file correctly using the same encoding. But then this script would generate files with different byte contents depending on the platform or even depending on locale settings in the same platform, creating compatibility problems.

Tip

Code that has to run on multiple machines or on multiple occasions should never depend on encoding defaults. Always pass an explicit encoding= argument when opening text files, because the default may change from one machine to the next, or from one day to the next.

A curious detail in Example 4-9 is that the write function in the first statement reports that four characters were written, but in the next line five characters are read. Example 4-10 is an extended version of Example 4-9, explaining that and other details.

Example 4-10. Closer inspection of Example 4-9 running on Windows reveals the bug and how to fix it

>>> fp = open('cafe.txt', 'w', encoding='utf_8')
>>> fp
<_io.TextIOWrapper name='cafe.txt' mode='w' encoding='utf_8'>
>>> fp.write('café')
4
>>> fp.close()
>>> import os
>>> os.stat('cafe.txt').st_size
5
>>> fp2 = open('cafe.txt')
>>> fp2
<_io.TextIOWrapper name='cafe.txt' mode='r' encoding='cp1252'>
>>> fp2.encoding
'cp1252'
>>> fp2.read()
'cafÃ©'
>>> fp3 = open('cafe.txt', encoding='utf_8')
>>> fp3
<_io.TextIOWrapper name='cafe.txt' mode='r' encoding='utf_8'>
>>> fp3.read()
'café'
>>> fp4 = open('cafe.txt', 'rb')
>>> fp4
<_io.BufferedReader name='cafe.txt'>
>>> fp4.read()
b'caf\xc3\xa9'

By default, open operates in text mode and returns a TextIOWrapper object.

The write method on a TextIOWrapper returns the number of Unicode characters written.

os.stat reports that the file holds 5 bytes; UTF-8 encodes 'é' as 2 bytes, 0xc3 and 0xa9.

Opening a text file with no explicit encoding returns a TextIOWrapper with the encoding set to a default from the locale.

A TextIOWrapper object has an encoding attribute that you can inspect: cp1252 in this case.

In the Windows cp1252 encoding, the byte 0xc3 is an “Ã” (A with tilde) and 0xa9 is the copyright sign.

Opening the same file with the correct encoding.

The expected result: the same four Unicode characters for 'café'.

The 'rb' flag opens a file for reading in binary mode.

The returned object is a BufferedReader and not a TextIOWrapper.

Reading that returns bytes, as expected.

Tip

Do not open text files in binary mode unless you need to analyze the file contents to determine the encoding—even then, you should be using Chardet instead of reinventing the wheel (see “How to Discover the Encoding of a Byte Sequence”). Ordinary code should only use binary mode to open binary files, like raster images.

The problem in Example 4-10 has to do with relying on a default setting while opening a text file. There are several sources for such defaults, as the next section shows.

Encoding Defaults: A Madhouse

Several settings affect the encoding defaults for I/O in Python. See the default_encodings.py script in Example 4-11.

Example 4-11. Exploring encoding defaults

import sys, locale

expressions = """
        locale.getpreferredencoding()
        type(my_file)
        my_file.encoding
        sys.stdout.isatty()
        sys.stdout.encoding
        sys.stdin.isatty()
        sys.stdin.encoding
        sys.stderr.isatty()
        sys.stderr.encoding
        sys.getdefaultencoding()
        sys.getfilesystemencoding()
    """

my_file = open('dummy', 'w')

for expression in expressions.split():
    value = eval(expression)
    print(expression.rjust(30), '->', repr(value))

The output of Example 4-11 on GNU/Linux (Ubuntu 14.04) and OSX (Mavericks 10.9) is identical, showing that UTF-8 is used everywhere in these systems:

$ python3 default_encodings.py
 locale.getpreferredencoding() -> 'UTF-8'
                 type(my_file) -> <class '_io.TextIOWrapper'>
              my_file.encoding -> 'UTF-8'
           sys.stdout.isatty() -> True
           sys.stdout.encoding -> 'UTF-8'
            sys.stdin.isatty() -> True
            sys.stdin.encoding -> 'UTF-8'
           sys.stderr.isatty() -> True
           sys.stderr.encoding -> 'UTF-8'
      sys.getdefaultencoding() -> 'utf-8'
   sys.getfilesystemencoding() -> 'utf-8'

On Windows, however, the output is Example 4-12.

Example 4-12. Default encodings on Windows 7 (SP 1) cmd.exe localized for Brazil; PowerShell gives same result

Z:\>chcp
Página de código ativa: 850
Z:\>python default_encodings.py
 locale.getpreferredencoding() -> 'cp1252'
                 type(my_file) -> <class '_io.TextIOWrapper'>
              my_file.encoding -> 'cp1252'
           sys.stdout.isatty() -> True
           sys.stdout.encoding -> 'cp850'
            sys.stdin.isatty() -> True
            sys.stdin.encoding -> 'cp850'
           sys.stderr.isatty() -> True
           sys.stderr.encoding -> 'cp850'
      sys.getdefaultencoding() -> 'utf-8'
   sys.getfilesystemencoding() -> 'mbcs'

chcp shows the active codepage for the console: 850.

Running default_encodings.py with output to console.

locale.getpreferredencoding() is the most important setting.

Text files use locale.getpreferredencoding() by default.

The output is going to the console, so sys.stdout.isatty() is True.

Therefore, sys.stdout.encoding is the same as the console encoding.

If the output is redirected to a file, like this:

Z:\>python default_encodings.py > encodings.log

The value of sys.stdout.isatty() becomes False, and sys.stdout.encoding is set by locale.getpreferredencoding(), 'cp1252' in that machine.

Note that there are four different encodings in Example 4-12:

If you omit the encoding argument when opening a file, the default is given by locale.getpreferredencoding() ('cp1252' in Example 4-12).

The encoding of sys.stdout/stdin/stderr is given by the PYTHONIOENCODING environment variable, if present, otherwise it is either inherited from the console or defined by locale.getpreferredencoding() if the output/input is redirected to/from a file.

sys.getdefaultencoding() is used internally by Python to convert binary data to/from str; this happens less often in Python 3, but still happens.⁶ Changing this setting is not supported.⁷

sys.getfilesystemencoding() is used to encode/decode filenames (not file contents). It is used when open() gets a str argument for the filename; if the filename is given as a bytes argument, it is passed unchanged to the OS API. The Python Unicode HOWTO says: “on Windows, Python uses the name mbcs to refer to whatever the currently configured encoding is.” The acronym MBCS stands for Multi Byte Character Set, which for Microsoft are the legacy variable-width encodings like gb2312 or Shift_JIS, but not UTF-8. (On this topic, a useful answer on StackOverflow is “Difference between MBCS and UTF-8 on Windows”.)

Note

On GNU/Linux and OSX all of these encodings are set to UTF-8 by default, and have been for several years, so I/O handles all Unicode characters. On Windows, not only are different encodings used in the same system, but they are usually codepages like 'cp850' or 'cp1252' that support only ASCII with 127 additional characters that are not the same from one encoding to the other. Therefore, Windows users are far more likely to face encoding errors unless they are extra careful.

To summarize, the most important encoding setting is that returned by locale.getpreferredencoding(): it is the default for opening text files and for sys.stdout/stdin/stderr when they are redirected to files. However, the documentation reads (in part):

locale.getpreferredencoding(do_setlocale=True)

Return the encoding used for text data, according to user preferences. User preferences are expressed differently on different systems, and might not be available programmatically on some systems, so this function only returns a guess. […]

Therefore, the best advice about encoding defaults is: do not rely on them.

If you follow the advice of the Unicode sandwich and always are explicit about the encodings in your programs, you will avoid a lot of pain. Unfortunately, Unicode is painful even if you get your bytes correctly converted to str. The next two sections cover subjects that are simple in ASCII-land, but get quite complex on planet Unicode: text normalization (i.e., converting text to a uniform representation for comparisons) and sorting.

Normalizing Unicode for Saner Comparisons

String comparisons are complicated by the fact that Unicode has combining characters: diacritics and other marks that attach to the preceding character, appearing as one when printed.

For example, the word “café” may be composed in two ways, using four or five code points, but the result looks exactly the same:

>>> s1 = 'café'
>>> s2 = 'cafe\u0301'
>>> s1, s2
('café', 'café')
>>> len(s1), len(s2)
(4, 5)
>>> s1 == s2
False

The code point U+0301 is the COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT. Using it after “e” renders “é”. In the Unicode standard, sequences like 'é' and 'e\u0301' are called “canonical equivalents,” and applications are supposed to treat them as the same. But Python sees two different sequences of code points, and considers them not equal.

The solution is to use Unicode normalization, provided by the unicodedata.normalize function. The first argument to that function is one of four strings: 'NFC', 'NFD', 'NFKC', and 'NFKD'. Let’s start with the first two.

Normalization Form C (NFC) composes the code points to produce the shortest equivalent string, while NFD decomposes, expanding composed characters into base characters and separate combining characters. Both of these normalizations make comparisons work as expected:

>>> from unicodedata import normalize
>>> s1 = 'café'  # composed "e" with acute accent
>>> s2 = 'cafe\u0301'  # decomposed "e" and acute accent
>>> len(s1), len(s2)
(4, 5)
>>> len(normalize('NFC', s1)), len(normalize('NFC', s2))
(4, 4)
>>> len(normalize('NFD', s1)), len(normalize('NFD', s2))
(5, 5)
>>> normalize('NFC', s1) == normalize('NFC', s2)
True
>>> normalize('NFD', s1) == normalize('NFD', s2)
True

Western keyboards usually generate composed characters, so text typed by users will be in NFC by default. However, to be safe, it may be good to sanitize strings with normalize('NFC', user_text) before saving. NFC is also the normalization form recommended by the W3C in Character Model for the World Wide Web: String Matching and Searching.

Some single characters are normalized by NFC into another single character. The symbol for the ohm (Ω) unit of electrical resistance is normalized to the Greek uppercase omega. They are visually identical, but they compare unequal so it is essential to normalize to avoid surprises:

>>> from unicodedata import normalize, name
>>> ohm = '\u2126'
>>> name(ohm)
'OHM SIGN'
>>> ohm_c = normalize('NFC', ohm)
>>> name(ohm_c)
'GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA'
>>> ohm == ohm_c
False
>>> normalize('NFC', ohm) == normalize('NFC', ohm_c)
True

In the acronyms for the other two normalization forms—NFKC and NFKD—the letter K stands for “compatibility.” These are stronger forms of normalization, affecting the so-called “compatibility characters.” Although one goal of Unicode is to have a single “canonical” code point for each character, some characters appear more than once for compatibility with preexisting standards. For example, the micro sign, 'µ' (U+00B5), was added to Unicode to support round-trip conversion to latin1, even though the same character is part of the Greek alphabet with code point U+03BC (GREEK SMALL LETTER MU). So, the micro sign is considered a “compatibility character.”

In the NFKC and NFKD forms, each compatibility character is replaced by a “compatibility decomposition” of one or more characters that are considered a “preferred” representation, even if there is some formatting loss—ideally, the formatting should be the responsibility of external markup, not part of Unicode. To exemplify, the compatibility decomposition of the one half fraction '½' (U+00BD) is the sequence of three characters '1/2', and the compatibility decomposition of the micro sign 'µ' (U+00B5) is the lowercase mu 'μ' (U+03BC).⁸

Here is how the NFKC works in practice:

>>> from unicodedata import normalize, name
>>> half = '½'
>>> normalize('NFKC', half)
'1⁄2'
>>> four_squared = '4²'
>>> normalize('NFKC', four_squared)
'42'
>>> micro = 'µ'
>>> micro_kc = normalize('NFKC', micro)
>>> micro, micro_kc
('µ', 'μ')
>>> ord(micro), ord(micro_kc)
(181, 956)
>>> name(micro), name(micro_kc)
('MICRO SIGN', 'GREEK SMALL LETTER MU')

Although '1⁄2' is a reasonable substitute for '½', and the micro sign is really a lowercase Greek mu, converting '4²' to '42' changes the meaning. An application could store '4²' as '4<sup>2</sup>', but the normalize function knows nothing about formatting. Therefore, NFKC or NFKD may lose or distort information, but they can produce convenient intermediate representations for searching and indexing: users may be pleased that a search for '1⁄2 inch' also finds documents containing '½ inch'.

Warning

NFKC and NFKD normalization should be applied with care and only in special cases—e.g., search and indexing—and not for permanent storage, because these transformations cause data loss.

When preparing text for searching or indexing, another operation is useful: case folding, our next subject.

Case Folding

Case folding is essentially converting all text to lowercase, with some additional transformations. It is supported by the str.casefold() method (new in Python 3.3).

For any string s containing only latin1 characters, s.casefold() produces the same result as s.lower(), with only two exceptions—the micro sign 'µ' is changed to the Greek lowercase mu (which looks the same in most fonts) and the German Eszett or “sharp s” (ß) becomes “ss”:

>>> micro = 'µ'
>>> name(micro)
'MICRO SIGN'
>>> micro_cf = micro.casefold()
>>> name(micro_cf)
'GREEK SMALL LETTER MU'
>>> micro, micro_cf
('µ', 'μ')
>>> eszett = 'ß'
>>> name(eszett)
'LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S'
>>> eszett_cf = eszett.casefold()
>>> eszett, eszett_cf
('ß', 'ss')

As of Python 3.4, there are 116 code points for which str.casefold() and str.lower() return different results. That’s 0.11% of a total of 110,122 named characters in Unicode 6.3.

As usual with anything related to Unicode, case folding is a complicated issue with plenty of linguistic special cases, but the Python core team made an effort to provide a solution that hopefully works for most users.

In the next couple of sections, we’ll put our normalization knowledge to use developing utility functions.

Utility Functions for Normalized Text Matching

As we’ve seen, NFC and NFD are safe to use and allow sensible comparisons between Unicode strings. NFC is the best normalized form for most applications. str.casefold() is the way to go for case-insensitive comparisons.

If you work with text in many languages, a pair of functions like nfc_equal and fold_equal in Example 4-13 are useful additions to your toolbox.

Example 4-13. normeq.py: normalized Unicode string comparison

"""
Utility functions for normalized Unicode string comparison.

Using Normal Form C, case sensitive:

    >>> s1 = 'café'
    >>> s2 = 'cafe\u0301'
    >>> s1 == s2
    False
    >>> nfc_equal(s1, s2)
    True
    >>> nfc_equal('A', 'a')
    False

Using Normal Form C with case folding:

    >>> s3 = 'Straße'
    >>> s4 = 'strasse'
    >>> s3 == s4
    False
    >>> nfc_equal(s3, s4)
    False
    >>> fold_equal(s3, s4)
    True
    >>> fold_equal(s1, s2)
    True
    >>> fold_equal('A', 'a')
    True

"""

from unicodedata import normalize

def nfc_equal(str1, str2):
    return normalize('NFC', str1) == normalize('NFC', str2)

def fold_equal(str1, str2):
    return (normalize('NFC', str1).casefold() ==
            normalize('NFC', str2).casefold())

Beyond Unicode normalization and case folding—which are both part of the Unicode standard—sometimes it makes sense to apply deeper transformations, like changing 'café' into 'cafe'. We’ll see when and how in the next section.

Extreme “Normalization”: Taking Out Diacritics

The Google Search secret sauce involves many tricks, but one of them apparently is ignoring diacritics (e.g., accents, cedillas, etc.), at least in some contexts. Removing diacritics is not a proper form of normalization because it often changes the meaning of words and may produce false positives when searching. But it helps coping with some facts of life: people sometimes are lazy or ignorant about the correct use of diacritics, and spelling rules change over time, meaning that accents come and go in living languages.

Outside of searching, getting rid of diacritics also makes for more readable URLs, at least in Latin-based languages. Take a look at the URL for the Wikipedia article about the city of São Paulo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_Paulo

The %C3%A3 part is the URL-escaped, UTF-8 rendering of the single letter “ã” (“a” with tilde). The following is much friendlier, even if it is not the right spelling:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sao_Paulo

To remove all diacritics from a str, you can use a function like Example 4-14.

Example 4-14. Function to remove all combining marks (module sanitize.py)

import unicodedata
import string

def shave_marks(txt):
    """Remove all diacritic marks"""
    norm_txt = unicodedata.normalize('NFD', txt)
    shaved = ''.join(c for c in norm_txt
                     if not unicodedata.combining(c))
    return unicodedata.normalize('NFC', shaved)

Decompose all characters into base characters and combining marks.

Filter out all combining marks.

Recompose all characters.

Example 4-15 shows a couple of uses of shave_marks.

Example 4-15. Two examples using shave_marks from Example 4-14

>>> order = '“Herr Voß: • ½ cup of Œtker™ caffè latte • bowl of açaí.”'
>>> shave_marks(order)
'“Herr Voß: • ½ cup of Œtker™ caffe latte • bowl of acai.”'
>>> Greek = 'Ζέφυρος, Zéfiro'
>>> shave_marks(Greek)
'Ζεφυρος, Zefiro'

Only the letters “è”, “ç”, and “í” were replaced.

Both “έ” and “é” were replaced.

The function shave_marks from Example 4-14 works all right, but maybe it goes too far. Often the reason to remove diacritics is to change Latin text to pure ASCII, but shave_marks also changes non-Latin characters—like Greek letters—which will never become ASCII just by losing their accents. So it makes sense to analyze each base character and to remove attached marks only if the base character is a letter from the Latin alphabet. This is what Example 4-16 does.

Example 4-16. Function to remove combining marks from Latin characters (import statements are omitted as this is part of the sanitize.py module from Example 4-14)

def shave_marks_latin(txt):
    """Remove all diacritic marks from Latin base characters"""
    norm_txt = unicodedata.normalize('NFD', txt)
    latin_base = False
    keepers = []
    for c in norm_txt:
        if unicodedata.combining(c) and latin_base:
            continue  # ignore diacritic on Latin base char
        keepers.append(c)
        # if it isn't combining char, it's a new base char
        if not unicodedata.combining(c):
            latin_base = c in string.ascii_letters
    shaved = ''.join(keepers)
    return unicodedata.normalize('NFC', shaved)

Decompose all characters into base characters and combining marks.

Skip over combining marks when base character is Latin.

Otherwise, keep current character.

Detect new base character and determine if it’s Latin.

Recompose all characters.

An even more radical step would be to replace common symbols in Western texts (e.g., curly quotes, em dashes, bullets, etc.) into ASCII equivalents. This is what the function asciize does in Example 4-17.

Example 4-17. Transform some Western typographical symbols into ASCII (this snippet is also part of sanitize.py from Example 4-14)

single_map = str.maketrans("""‚ƒ„†ˆ‹‘’“”•–—˜›""",
                           """'f"*^<''""---~>""")

multi_map = str.maketrans({
    '€': '<euro>',
    '…': '...',
    'Œ': 'OE',
    '™': '(TM)',
    'œ': 'oe',
    '‰': '<per mille>',
    '‡': '**',
})

multi_map.update(single_map)

def dewinize(txt):
    """Replace Win1252 symbols with ASCII chars or sequences"""
    return txt.translate(multi_map)

def asciize(txt):
    no_marks = shave_marks_latin(dewinize(txt))
    no_marks = no_marks.replace('ß', 'ss')
    return unicodedata.normalize('NFKC', no_marks)

Build mapping table for char-to-char replacement.

Build mapping table for char-to-string replacement.

Merge mapping tables.

dewinize does not affect ASCII or latin1 text, only the Microsoft additions in to latin1 in cp1252.

Apply dewinize and remove diacritical marks.

Replace the Eszett with “ss” (we are not using case fold here because we want to preserve the case).

Apply NFKC normalization to compose characters with their compatibility code points.

Example 4-18 shows asciize in use.

Example 4-18. Two examples using asciize from Example 4-17

>>> order = '“Herr Voß: • ½ cup of Œtker™ caffè latte • bowl of açaí.”'
>>> dewinize(order)
'"Herr Voß: - ½ cup of OEtker(TM) caffè latte - bowl of açaí."'
>>> asciize(order)
'"Herr Voss: - 1⁄2 cup of OEtker(TM) caffe latte - bowl of acai."'

dewinize replaces curly quotes, bullets, and ™ (trademark symbol).

asciize applies dewinize, drops diacritics, and replaces the 'ß'.

Warning

Different languages have their own rules for removing diacritics. For example, Germans change the 'ü' into 'ue'. Our asciize function is not as refined, so it may or not be suitable for your language. It works acceptably for Portuguese, though.

To summarize, the functions in sanitize.py go way beyond standard normalization and perform deep surgery on the text, with a good chance of changing its meaning. Only you can decide whether to go so far, knowing the target language, your users, and how the transformed text will be used.

This wraps up our discussion of normalizing Unicode text.

The next Unicode matter to sort out is… sorting.

Sorting Unicode Text

Python sorts sequences of any type by comparing the items in each sequence one by one. For strings, this means comparing the code points. Unfortunately, this produces unacceptable results for anyone who uses non-ASCII characters.

Consider sorting a list of fruits grown in Brazil:

>>> fruits = ['caju', 'atemoia', 'cajá', 'açaí', 'acerola']
>>> sorted(fruits)
['acerola', 'atemoia', 'açaí', 'caju', 'cajá']

Sorting rules vary for different locales, but in Portuguese and many languages that use the Latin alphabet, accents and cedillas rarely make a difference when sorting.⁹ So “cajá” is sorted as “caja,” and must come before “caju.”

The sorted fruits list should be:

['açaí', 'acerola', 'atemoia', 'cajá', 'caju']

The standard way to sort non-ASCII text in Python is to use the locale.strxfrm function which, according to the locale module docs, “transforms a string to one that can be used in locale-aware comparisons.”

To enable locale.strxfrm, you must first set a suitable locale for your application, and pray that the OS supports it. On GNU/Linux (Ubuntu 14.04) with the pt_BR locale, the sequence of commands in Example 4-19 works.

Example 4-19. Using the locale.strxfrm function as sort key

>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_COLLATE, 'pt_BR.UTF-8')
'pt_BR.UTF-8'
>>> fruits = ['caju', 'atemoia', 'cajá', 'açaí', 'acerola']
>>> sorted_fruits = sorted(fruits, key=locale.strxfrm)
>>> sorted_fruits
['açaí', 'acerola', 'atemoia', 'cajá', 'caju']

So you need to call setlocale(LC_COLLATE, «your_locale») before using locale.strxfrm as the key when sorting.

There are a few caveats, though:

Because locale settings are global, calling setlocale in a library is not recommended. Your application or framework should set the locale when the process starts, and should not change it afterwards.

The locale must be installed on the OS, otherwise setlocale raises a locale.Error: unsupported locale setting exception.

You must know how to spell the locale name. They are pretty much standardized in the Unix derivatives as 'language_code.encoding', but on Windows the syntax is more complicated: Language Name-Language Variant_Region Name.codepage. Note that the Language Name, Language Variant, and Region Name parts can have spaces inside them, but the parts after the first are prefixed with special different characters: a hyphen, an underline character, and a dot. All parts seem to be optional except the language name. For example: English_United States.850 means Language Name “English”, region “United States”, and codepage “850”. The language and region names Windows understands are listed in the MSDN article Language Identifier Constants and Strings, while Code Page Identifiers lists the numbers for the last part.¹⁰

The locale must be correctly implemented by the makers of the OS. I was successful on Ubuntu 14.04, but not on OSX (Mavericks 10.9). On two different Macs, the call setlocale(LC_COLLATE, 'pt_BR.UTF-8') returns the string 'pt_BR.UTF-8' with no complaints. But sorted(fruits, key=locale.strxfrm) produced the same incorrect result as sorted(fruits) did. I also tried the fr_FR, es_ES, and de_DE locales on OSX, but locale.strxfrm never did its job.¹¹

So the standard library solution to internationalized sorting works, but seems to be well supported only on GNU/Linux (perhaps also on Windows, if you are an expert). Even then, it depends on locale settings, creating deployment headaches.

Fortunately, there is a simpler solution: the PyUCA library, available on PyPI.

Sorting with the Unicode Collation Algorithm

James Tauber, prolific Django contributor, must have felt the pain and created PyUCA, a pure-Python implementation of the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA). Example 4-20 shows how easy it is to use.

Example 4-20. Using the pyuca.Collator.sort_key method

>>> import pyuca
>>> coll = pyuca.Collator()
>>> fruits = ['caju', 'atemoia', 'cajá', 'açaí', 'acerola']
>>> sorted_fruits = sorted(fruits, key=coll.sort_key)
>>> sorted_fruits
['açaí', 'acerola', 'atemoia', 'cajá', 'caju']

This is friendly and just works. I tested it on GNU/Linux, OSX, and Windows. Only Python 3.X is supported at this time.

PyUCA does not take the locale into account. If you need to customize the sorting, you can provide the path to a custom collation table to the Collator() constructor. Out of the box, it uses allkeys.txt, which is bundled with the project. That’s just a copy of the Default Unicode Collation Element Table from Unicode 6.3.0.

By the way, that table is one of the many that comprise the Unicode database, our next subject.

The Unicode Database

The Unicode standard provides an entire database—in the form of numerous structured text files—that includes not only the table mapping code points to character names, but also metadata about the individual characters and how they are related. For example, the Unicode database records whether a character is printable, is a letter, is a decimal digit, or is some other numeric symbol. That’s how the str methods isidentifier, isprintable, isdecimal, and isnumeric work. str.casefold also uses information from a Unicode table.

The unicodedata module has functions that return character metadata; for instance, its official name in the standard, whether it is a combining character (e.g., diacritic like a combining tilde), and the numeric value of the symbol for humans (not its code point). Example 4-21 shows the use of unicodedata.name() and unicodedata.numeric() along with the .isdecimal() and .isnumeric() methods of str.

Example 4-21. Demo of Unicode database numerical character metadata (callouts describe each column in the output)

import unicodedata
import re

re_digit = re.compile(r'\d')

sample = '1\xbc\xb2\u0969\u136b\u216b\u2466\u2480\u3285'

for char in sample:
    print('U+%04x' % ord(char),
          char.center(6),
          're_dig' if re_digit.match(char) else '-',
          'isdig' if char.isdigit() else '-',
          'isnum' if char.isnumeric() else '-',
          format(unicodedata.numeric(char), '5.2f'),
          unicodedata.name(char),
          sep='\t')

Code point in U+0000 format.

Character centralized in a str of length 6.

Show re_dig if character matches the r'\d' regex.

Show isdig if char.isdigit() is True.

Show isnum if char.isnumeric() is True.

Numeric value formated with width 5 and 2 decimal places.

Unicode character name.

Running Example 4-21 gives you the result in Figure 4-3.

Figure 4-3. Nine numeric characters and metadata about them; re_dig means the character matches the regular expression r’\d’

The sixth column of Figure 4-3 is the result of calling unicodedata.numeric(char) on the character. It shows that Unicode knows the numeric value of symbols that represent numbers. So if you want to create a spreadsheet application that supports Tamil digits or Roman numerals, go for it!

Figure 4-3 shows that the regular expression r'\d' matches the digit “1” and the Devanagari digit 3, but not some other characters that are considered digits by the isdigit function. The re module is not as savvy about Unicode as it could be. The new regex module available in PyPI was designed to eventually replace re and provides better Unicode support.¹² We’ll come back to the re module in the next section.

Throughout this chapter we’ve used several unicodedata functions, but there are many more we did not cover. See the standard library documentation for the unicodedata module.

We will wrap up our tour of str versus bytes with a quick look at a new trend: dual-mode APIs offering functions that accept str or bytes arguments with special handling depending on the type.

Dual-Mode str and bytes APIs

The standard library has functions that accept str or bytes arguments and behave differently depending on the type. Some examples are in the re and os modules.

str Versus bytes in Regular Expressions

If you build a regular expression with bytes, patterns such as \d and \w only match ASCII characters; in contrast, if these patterns are given as str, they match Unicode digits or letters beyond ASCII. Example 4-22 and Figure 4-4 compare how letters, ASCII digits, superscripts, and Tamil digits are matched by str and bytes patterns.

Example 4-22. ramanujan.py: compare behavior of simple str and bytes regular expressions

import re

re_numbers_str = re.compile(r'\d+')
re_words_str = re.compile(r'\w+')
re_numbers_bytes = re.compile(rb'\d+')
re_words_bytes = re.compile(rb'\w+')

text_str = ("Ramanujan saw \u0be7\u0bed\u0be8\u0bef"
            " as 1729 = 1³ + 12³ = 9³ + 10³.")

text_bytes = text_str.encode('utf_8')

print('Text', repr(text_str), sep='\n  ')
print('Numbers')
print('  str  :', re_numbers_str.findall(text_str))
print('  bytes:', re_numbers_bytes.findall(text_bytes))
print('Words')
print('  str  :', re_words_str.findall(text_str))
print('  bytes:', re_words_bytes.findall(text_bytes))

The first two regular expressions are of the str type.

The last two are of the bytes type.

Unicode text to search, containing the Tamil digits for 1729 (the logical line continues until the right parenthesis token).

This string is joined to the previous one at compile time (see “2.4.2. String literal concatenation” in The Python Language Reference).

A bytes string is needed to search with the bytes regular expressions.

The str pattern r'\d+' matches the Tamil and ASCII digits.

The bytes pattern rb'\d+' matches only the ASCII bytes for digits.

The str pattern r'\w+' matches the letters, superscripts, Tamil, and ASCII digits.

The bytes pattern rb'\w+' matches only the ASCII bytes for letters and digits.

Figure 4-4. Screenshot of running ramanujan.py from Example 4-22

Example 4-22 is a trivial example to make one point: you can use regular expressions on str and bytes, but in the second case bytes outside of the ASCII range are treated as nondigits and nonword characters.

For str regular expressions, there is a re.ASCII flag that makes \w, \W, \b, \B, \d, \D, \s, and \S perform ASCII-only matching. See the documentation of the re module for full details.

Another important dual-mode module is os.

str Versus bytes on os Functions

The GNU/Linux kernel is not Unicode savvy, so in the real world you may find filenames made of byte sequences that are not valid in any sensible encoding scheme, and cannot be decoded to str. File servers with clients using a variety of OSes are particularly prone to this problem.

In order to work around this issue, all os module functions that accept filenames or pathnames take arguments as str or bytes. If one such function is called with a str argument, the argument will be automatically converted using the codec named by sys.getfilesystemencoding(), and the OS response will be decoded with the same codec. This is almost always what you want, in keeping with the Unicode sandwich best practice.

But if you must deal with (and perhaps fix) filenames that cannot be handled in that way, you can pass bytes arguments to the os functions to get bytes return values. This feature lets you deal with any file or pathname, no matter how many gremlins you may find. See Example 4-23.

Example 4-23. listdir with str and bytes arguments and results

>>> os.listdir('.')
['abc.txt', 'digits-of-π.txt']
>>> os.listdir(b'.')
[b'abc.txt', b'digits-of-\xcf\x80.txt']

The second filename is “digits-of-π.txt” (with the Greek letter pi).

Given a byte argument, listdir returns filenames as bytes: b'\xcf\x80' is the UTF-8 encoding of the Greek letter pi).

To help with manual handling of str or bytes sequences that are file or pathnames, the os module provides special encoding and decoding functions:

fsencode(filename)

Encodes filename (can be str or bytes) to bytes using the codec named by sys.getfilesystemencoding() if filename is of type str, otherwise returns the filename bytes unchanged.

fsdecode(filename)

Decodes filename (can be str or bytes) to str using the codec named by sys.getfilesystemencoding() if filename is of type bytes, otherwise returns the filename str unchanged.

On Unix-derived platforms, these functions use the surrogateescape error handler (see the sidebar that follows) to avoid choking on unexpected bytes. On Windows, the strict error handler is used.

Using surrogateescape to Deal with Gremlins

A trick to deal with unexpected bytes or unknown encodings is the surrogateescape codec error handler described in PEP 383 — Non-decodable Bytes in System Character Interfaces introduced in Python 3.1.

The idea of this error handler is to replace each nondecodable byte with a code point in the Unicode range from U+DC00 to U+DCFF that lies in the so-called “Low Surrogate Area” of the standard—a code space with no characters assigned, reserved for internal use in applications. On encoding, such code points are converted back to the byte values they replaced. See Example 4-24.

Example 4-24. Using surrogatescape error handling

>>> os.listdir('.')
['abc.txt', 'digits-of-π.txt']
>>> os.listdir(b'.')
[b'abc.txt', b'digits-of-\xcf\x80.txt']
>>> pi_name_bytes = os.listdir(b'.')[1]
>>> pi_name_str = pi_name_bytes.decode('ascii', 'surrogateescape')
>>> pi_name_str
'digits-of-\udccf\udc80.txt'
>>> pi_name_str.encode('ascii', 'surrogateescape')
b'digits-of-\xcf\x80.txt'

List directory with a non-ASCII filename.

Let’s pretend we don’t know the encoding and get filenames as bytes.

pi_names_bytes is the filename with the pi character.

Decode it to str using the 'ascii' codec with 'surrogateescape'.

Each non-ASCII byte is replaced by a surrogate code point: '\xcf\x80' becomes '\udccf\udc80'.

Encode back to ASCII bytes: each surrogate code point is replaced by the byte it replaced.

This ends our exploration of str and bytes. If you are still with me, congratulations!

Chapter Summary

We started the chapter by dismissing the notion that 1 character == 1 byte. As the world adopts Unicode (80% of websites already use UTF-8), we need to keep the concept of text strings separated from the binary sequences that represent them in files, and Python 3 enforces this separation.

After a brief overview of the binary sequence data types—bytes, bytearray, and memoryview—we jumped into encoding and decoding, with a sampling of important codecs, followed by approaches to prevent or deal with the infamous UnicodeEncodeError, UnicodeDecodeError, and the SyntaxError caused by wrong encoding in Python source files.

While on the subject of source code, I presented my position on the debate about non-ASCII identifiers: if the maintainers of the code base want to use a human language that has non-ASCII characters, the identifiers should follow suit—unless the code needs to run on Python 2 as well. But if the project aims to attract an international contributor base, identifiers should be made from English words, and then ASCII suffices.

We then considered the theory and practice of encoding detection in the absence of metadata: in theory, it can’t be done, but in practice the Chardet package pulls it off pretty well for a number of popular encodings. Byte order marks were then presented as the only encoding hint commonly found in UTF-16 and UTF-32 files—sometimes in UTF-8 files as well.

In the next section, we demonstrated opening text files, an easy task except for one pitfall: the encoding= keyword argument is not mandatory when you open a text file, but it should be. If you fail to specify the encoding, you end up with a program that manages to generate “plain text” that is incompatible across platforms, due to conflicting default encodings. We then exposed the different encoding settings that Python uses as defaults and how to detect them: locale.getpreferredencoding(), sys.getfilesystemencoding(), sys.getdefaultencoding(), and the encodings for the standard I/O files (e.g., sys.stdout.encoding). A sad realization for Windows users is that these settings often have distinct values within the same machine, and the values are mutually incompatible; GNU/Linux and OSX users, in contrast, live in a happier place where UTF-8 is the default pretty much everywhere.

Text comparisons are surprisingly complicated because Unicode provides multiple ways of representing some characters, so normalizing is a prerequisite to text matching. In addition to explaining normalization and case folding, we presented some utility functions that you may adapt to your needs, including drastic transformations like removing all accents. We then saw how to sort Unicode text correctly by leveraging the standard locale module—with some caveats—and an alternative that does not depend on tricky locale configurations: the external PyUCA package.

Finally, we glanced at the Unicode database (a source of metadata about every character), and wrapped up with brief discussion of dual-mode APIs (e.g., the re and os modules, where some functions can be called with str or bytes arguments, prompting different yet fitting results).

Further Reading

Ned Batchelder’s 2012 PyCon US talk “Pragmatic Unicode — or — How Do I Stop the Pain?” was outstanding. Ned is so professional that he provides a full transcript of the talk along with the slides and video. Esther Nam and Travis Fischer gave an excellent PyCon 2014 talk “Character encoding and Unicode in Python: How to (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ with dignity” (slides, video), from which I quoted this chapter’s short and sweet epigraph: “Humans use text. Computers speak bytes.” Lennart Regebro—one of this book’s technical reviewers—presents his “Useful Mental Model of Unicode (UMMU)” in the short post “Unconfusing Unicode: What Is Unicode?”. Unicode is a complex standard, so Lennart’s UMMU is a really useful starting point.

The official Unicode HOWTO in the Python docs approaches the subject from several different angles, from a good historic intro to syntax details, codecs, regular expressions, filenames, and best practices for Unicode-aware I/O (i.e., the Unicode sandwich), with plenty of additional reference links from each section. Chapter 4, “Strings”, of Mark Pilgrim’s awesome book Dive into Python 3 also provides a very good intro to Unicode support in Python 3. In the same book, Chapter 15 describes how the Chardet library was ported from Python 2 to Python 3, a valuable case study given that the switch from the old str to the new bytes is the cause of most migration pains, and that is a central concern in a library designed to detect encodings.

If you know Python 2 but are new to Python 3, Guido van Rossum’s What’s New in Python 3.0 has 15 bullet points that summarize what changed, with lots of links. Guido starts with the blunt statement: “Everything you thought you knew about binary data and Unicode has changed.” Armin Ronacher’s blog post “The Updated Guide to Unicode on Python” is deep and highlights some of the pitfalls of Unicode in Python 3 (Armin is not a big fan of Python 3).

Chapter 2, “Strings and Text,” of the Python Cookbook, Third Edition (O’Reilly), by David Beazley and Brian K. Jones, has several recipes dealing with Unicode normalization, sanitizing text, and performing text-oriented operations on byte sequences. Chapter 5 covers files and I/O, and it includes “Recipe 5.17. Writing Bytes to a Text File,” showing that underlying any text file there is always a binary stream that may be accessed directly when needed. Later in the cookbook, the struct module is put to use in “Recipe 6.11. Reading and Writing Binary Arrays of Structures.”

Nick Coghlan’s Python Notes blog has two posts very relevant to this chapter: “Python 3 and ASCII Compatible Binary Protocols” and “Processing Text Files in Python 3”. Highly recommended.

Binary sequences are about to gain new constructors and methods in Python 3.5, with one of the current constructor signatures being deprecated (see PEP 467 — Minor API improvements for binary sequences). Python 3.5 should also see the implementation of PEP 461 — Adding % formatting to bytes and bytearray.

A list of encodings supported by Python is available at Standard Encodings in the codecs module documentation. If you need to get that list programmatically, see how it’s done in the /Tools/unicode/listcodecs.py script that comes with the CPython source code.

Martijn Faassen’s “Changing the Python Default Encoding Considered Harmful” and Tarek Ziadé’s “sys.setdefaultencoding Is Evil” explain why the default encoding you get from sys.getdefaultencoding() should never be changed, even if you discover how.

The books Unicode Explained by Jukka K. Korpela (O’Reilly) and Unicode Demystified by Richard Gillam (Addison-Wesley) are not Python-specific but were very helpful as I studied Unicode concepts. Programming with Unicode by Victor Stinner is a free, self-published book (Creative Commons BY-SA) covering Unicode in general as well as tools and APIs in the context of the main operating systems and a few programming languages, including Python.

The W3C pages Case Folding: An Introduction and Character Model for the World Wide Web: String Matching and Searching cover normalization concepts, with the former being a gentle introduction and the latter a working draft written in dry standard-speak—the same tone of the Unicode Standard Annex #15 — Unicode Normalization Forms. The Frequently Asked Questions / Normalization from Unicode.org is more readable, as is the NFC FAQ by Mark Davis—author of several Unicode algorithms and president of the Unicode Consortium at the time of this writing.

Soapbox

What Is “Plain Text”?

For anyone who deals with non-English text on a daily basis, “plain text” does not imply “ASCII.” The Unicode Glossary defines plain text like this:

Computer-encoded text that consists only of a sequence of code points from a given standard, with no other formatting or structural information.

That definition starts very well, but I don’t agree with the part after the comma. HTML is a great example of a plain-text format that carries formatting and structural information. But it’s still plain text because every byte in such a file is there to represent a text character, usually using UTF-8. There are no bytes with nontext meaning, as you can find in a .png or .xls document where most bytes represent packed binary values like RGB values and floating-point numbers. In plain text, numbers are represented as sequences of digit characters.

I am writing this book in a plain-text format called—ironically—AsciiDoc, which is part of the toolchain of O’Reilly’s excellent Atlas book publishing platform. AsciiDoc source files are plain text, but they are UTF-8, not ASCII. Otherwise, writing this chapter would have been really painful. Despite the name, AsciiDoc is just great.

The world of Unicode is constantly expanding and, at the edges, tool support is not always there. That’s why I had to use images for Figures 4-1, 4-3, and 4-4: not all characters I wanted to show were available in the fonts used to render the book. On the other hand, the Ubuntu 14.04 and OSX 10.9 terminals display them perfectly well—including the Japanese characters for the word “mojibake”: 文字化け.

Unicode Riddles

Imprecise qualifiers such as “often,” “most,” and “usually” seem to pop up whenever I write about Unicode normalization. I regret the lack of more definitive advice, but there are so many exceptions to the rules in Unicode that it is hard to be absolutely positive.

For example, the µ (micro sign) is considered a “compatibility character” but the Ω (ohm) and Å (Ångström) symbols are not. The difference has practical consequences: NFC normalization—recommended for text matching—replaces the Ω (ohm) by Ω (uppercase Grek omega) and the Å (Ångström) by Å (uppercase A with ring above). But as a “compatibility character” the µ (micro sign) is not replaced by the visually identical μ (lowercase Greek mu), except when the stronger NFKC or NFKD normalizations are applied, and these transformations are lossy.

I understand the µ (micro sign) is in Unicode because it appears in the latin1 encoding and replacing it with the Greek mu would break round-trip conversion. After all, that’s why the micro sign is a “compatibility character.” But if the ohm and Ångström symbols are not in Unicode for compatibility reasons, then why have them at all? There are already code points for the GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA and the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE, which look the same and replace them on NFC normalization. Go figure.

My take after many hours studying Unicode: it is hugely complex and full of special cases, reflecting the wonderful variety of human languages and the politics of industry standards.

How Are str Represented in RAM?

The official Python docs avoid the issue of how the code points of a str are stored in memory. This is, after all, an implementation detail. In theory, it doesn’t matter: whatever the internal representation, every str must be encoded to bytes on output.

In memory, Python 3 stores each str as a sequence of code points using a fixed number of bytes per code point, to allow efficient direct access to any character or slice.

Before Python 3.3, CPython could be compiled to use either 16 or 32 bits per code point in RAM; the former was a “narrow build,” and the latter a “wide build.” To know which you have, check the value of sys.maxunicode: 65535 implies a “narrow build” that can’t handle code points above U+FFFF transparently. A “wide build” doesn’t have this limitation, but consumes a lot of memory: 4 bytes per character, even while the vast majority of code points for Chinese ideographs fit in 2 bytes. Neither option was great, so you had to choose depending on your needs.

Since Python 3.3, when creating a new str object, the interpreter checks the characters in it and chooses the most economic memory layout that is suitable for that particular str: if there are only characters in the latin1 range, that str will use just one byte per code point. Otherwise, 2 or 4 bytes per code point may be used, depending on the str. This is a simplification; for the full details, look up PEP 393 — Flexible String Representation.

The flexible string representation is similar to the way the int type works in Python 3: if the integer fits in a machine word, it is stored in one machine word. Otherwise, the interpreter switches to a variable-length representation like that of the Python 2 long type. It is nice to see the spread of good ideas.

¹ Slide 12 of PyCon 2014 talk “Character Encoding and Unicode in Python” (slides, video).

² Pillow is PIL’s most active fork.

³ As of September, 2014, W3Techs: Usage of Character Encodings for Websites claims that 81.4% of sites use UTF-8, while Built With: Encoding Usage Statistics estimates 79.4%.

⁴ I first saw the term “Unicode sandwich” in Ned Batchelder’s excellent “Pragmatic Unicode” talk at US PyCon 2012.

⁵ Python 2.6 or 2.7 users have to use io.open() to get automatic decoding/encoding when reading/writing.

⁶ While researching this subject, I did not find a list of situations when Python 3 internally converts bytes to str. Python core developer Antoine Pitrou says on the comp.python.devel list that CPython internal functions that depend on such conversions “don’t get a lot of use in py3k.”

⁷ The Python 2 sys.setdefaultencoding function was misused and is no longer documented in Python 3. It was intended for use by the core developers when the internal default encoding of Python was still undecided. In the same comp.python.devel thread, Marc-André Lemburg states that the sys.setdefaultencoding must never be called by user code and the only values supported by CPython are 'ascii' in Python 2 and 'utf-8' in Python 3.

⁸ Curiously, the micro sign is considered a “compatibility character” but the ohm symbol is not. The end result is that NFC doesn’t touch the micro sign but changes the ohm symbol to capital omega, while NFKC and NFKD change both the ohm and the micro into other characters.

⁹ Diacritics affect sorting only in the rare case when they are the only difference between two words—in that case, the word with a diacritic is sorted after the plain word.

¹⁰ Thanks to Leonardo Rochael who went beyond his duties as tech reviewer and researched these Windows details, even though he is a GNU/Linux user himself.

¹¹ Again, I could not find a solution, but did find other people reporting the same problem. Alex Martelli, one of the tech reviewers, had no problem using setlocale and locale.strxfrm on his Mac with OSX 10.9. In summary: your mileage may vary.

¹² Although it was not better than re at identifying digits in this particular sample.

Part III. Functions as Objects

Chapter 5. First-Class Functions

I have never considered Python to be heavily influenced by functional languages, no matter what people say or think. I was much more familiar with imperative languages such as C and Algol 68 and although I had made functions first-class objects, I didn’t view Python as a functional programming language.¹

Guido van Rossum, Python BDFL

Functions in Python are first-class objects. Programming language theorists define a “first-class object” as a program entity that can be:

Created at runtime

Assigned to a variable or element in a data structure

Passed as an argument to a function

Returned as the result of a function

Integers, strings, and dictionaries are other examples of first-class objects in Python—nothing fancy here. But if you came to Python from a language where functions are not first-class citizens, this chapter and the rest of Part III of the book focuses on the implications and practical applications of treating functions as objects.

Tip

The term “first-class functions” is widely used as shorthand for “functions as first-class objects.” It’s not perfect because it seems to imply an “elite” among functions. In Python, all functions are first-class.

Treating a Function Like an Object

The console session in Example 5-1 shows that Python functions are objects. Here we create a function, call it, read its __doc__ attribute, and check that the function object itself is an instance of the function class.

Example 5-1. Create and test a function, then read its __doc__ and check its type

>>> def factorial(n):
...     '''returns n!'''
...     return 1 if n < 2 else n * factorial(n-1)
...
>>> factorial(42)
1405006117752879898543142606244511569936384000000000
>>> factorial.__doc__
'returns n!'
>>> type(factorial)
<class 'function'>

This is a console session, so we’re creating a function in “runtime.”

__doc__ is one of several attributes of function objects.

factorial is an instance of the function class.

The __doc__ attribute is used to generate the help text of an object. In the Python interactive console, the command help(factorial) will display a screen like that in Figure 5-1.

Figure 5-1. Help screen for the factorial function; the text is from the __doc__ attribute of the function object

Example 5-2 shows the “first class” nature of a function object. We can assign it a variable fact and call it through that name. We can also pass factorial as an argument to map. The map function returns an iterable where each item is the result of the application of the first argument (a function) to succesive elements of the second argument (an iterable), range(10) in this example.

Example 5-2. Use function through a different name, and pass function as argument

>>> fact = factorial
>>> fact
<function factorial at 0x...>
>>> fact(5)
120
>>> map(factorial, range(11))
<map object at 0x...>
>>> list(map(fact, range(11)))
[1, 1, 2, 6, 24, 120, 720, 5040, 40320, 362880, 3628800]

Having first-class functions enables programming in a functional style. One of the hallmarks of functional programming is the use of higher-order functions, our next topic.

Higher-Order Functions

A function that takes a function as argument or returns a function as the result is a higher-order function. One example is map, shown in Example 5-2. Another is the built-in function sorted: an optional key argument lets you provide a function to be applied to each item for sorting, as seen in “list.sort and the sorted Built-In Function”.

For example, to sort a list of words by length, simply pass the len function as the key, as in Example 5-3.

Example 5-3. Sorting a list of words by length

>>> fruits = ['strawberry', 'fig', 'apple', 'cherry', 'raspberry', 'banana']
>>> sorted(fruits, key=len)
['fig', 'apple', 'cherry', 'banana', 'raspberry', 'strawberry']
>>>

Any one-argument function can be used as the key. For example, to create a rhyme dictionary it might be useful to sort each word spelled backward. In Example 5-4, note that the words in the list are not changed at all; only their reversed spelling is used as the sort criterion, so that the berries appear together.

Example 5-4. Sorting a list of words by their reversed spelling

>>> def reverse(word):
...     return word[::-1]
>>> reverse('testing')
'gnitset'
>>> sorted(fruits, key=reverse)
['banana', 'apple', 'fig', 'raspberry', 'strawberry', 'cherry']
>>>

In the functional programming paradigm, some of the best known higher-order functions are map, filter, reduce, and apply. The apply function was deprecated in Python 2.3 and removed in Python 3 because it’s no longer necessary. If you need to call a function with a dynamic set of arguments, you can just write fn(*args, **keywords) instead of apply(fn, args, kwargs).

The map, filter, and reduce higher-order functions are still around, but better alternatives are available for most of their use cases, as the next section shows.

Modern Replacements for map, filter, and reduce

Functional languages commonly offer the map, filter, and reduce higher-order functions (sometimes with different names). The map and filter functions are still built-ins in Python 3, but since the introduction of list comprehensions and generator expressions, they are not as important. A listcomp or a genexp does the job of map and filter combined, but is more readable. Consider Example 5-5.

Example 5-5. Lists of factorials produced with map and filter compared to alternatives coded as list comprehensions

>>> list(map(fact, range(6)))
[1, 1, 2, 6, 24, 120]
>>> [fact(n) for n in range(6)]
[1, 1, 2, 6, 24, 120]
>>> list(map(factorial, filter(lambda n: n % 2, range(6))))
[1, 6, 120]
>>> [factorial(n) for n in range(6) if n % 2]
[1, 6, 120]
>>>

Build a list of factorials from 0! to 5!.

Same operation, with a list comprehension.

List of factorials of odd numbers up to 5!, using both map and filter.

List comprehension does the same job, replacing map and filter, and making lambda unnecessary.

In Python 3, map and filter return generators—a form of iterator—so their direct substitute is now a generator expression (in Python 2, these functions returned lists, therefore their closest alternative is a listcomp).

The reduce function was demoted from a built-in in Python 2 to the functools module in Python 3. Its most common use case, summation, is better served by the sum built-in available since Python 2.3 was released in 2003. This is a big win in terms of readability and performance (see Example 5-6).

Example 5-6. Sum of integers up to 99 performed with reduce and sum

>>> from functools import reduce
>>> from operator import add
>>> reduce(add, range(100))
4950
>>> sum(range(100))
4950
>>>

Starting with Python 3.0, reduce is not a built-in.

Import add to avoid creating a function just to add two numbers.

Sum integers up to 99.

Same task using sum; import or adding function not needed.

Note

The common idea of sum and reduce is to apply some operation to successive items in a sequence, accumulating previous results, thus reducing a sequence of values to a single value.

Other reducing built-ins are all and any:

all(iterable)

Returns True if every element of the iterable is truthy; all([]) returns True.

any(iterable)

Returns True if any element of the iterable is truthy; any([]) returns False.

I give a fuller explanation of reduce in “Vector Take #4: Hashing and a Faster ==” where an ongoing example provides a meaningful context for the use of this function. The reducing functions are summarized later in the book when iterables are in focus, in “Iterable Reducing Functions”.

To use a higher-order function, sometimes it is convenient to create a small, one-off function. That is why anonymous functions exist. We’ll cover them next.

Anonymous Functions

The lambda keyword creates an anonymous function within a Python expression.

However, the simple syntax of Python limits the body of lambda functions to be pure expressions. In other words, the body of a lambda cannot make assignments or use any other Python statement such as while, try, etc.

The best use of anonymous functions is in the context of an argument list. For example, Example 5-7 is the rhyme index example from Example 5-4 rewritten with lambda, without defining a reverse function.

Example 5-7. Sorting a list of words by their reversed spelling using lambda

>>> fruits = ['strawberry', 'fig', 'apple', 'cherry', 'raspberry', 'banana']
>>> sorted(fruits, key=lambda word: word[::-1])
['banana', 'apple', 'fig', 'raspberry', 'strawberry', 'cherry']
>>>

Outside the limited context of arguments to higher-order functions, anonymous functions are rarely useful in Python. The syntactic restrictions tend to make nontrivial lambdas either unreadable or unworkable.

Lundh’s lambda Refactoring Recipe

If you find a piece of code hard to understand because of a lambda, Fredrik Lundh suggests this refactoring procedure:

Write a comment explaining what the heck that lambda does.

Study the comment for a while, and think of a name that captures the essence of the comment.

Convert the lambda to a def statement, using that name.

Remove the comment.

These steps are quoted from the Functional Programming HOWTO, a must read.

The lambda syntax is just syntactic sugar: a lambda expression creates a function object just like the def statement. That is just one of several kinds of callable objects in Python. The following section reviews all of them.

The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects

The call operator (i.e., ()) may be applied to other objects beyond user-defined functions. To determine whether an object is callable, use the callable() built-in function. The Python Data Model documentation lists seven callable types:

User-defined functions

Created with def statements or lambda expressions.

Built-in functions

A function implemented in C (for CPython), like len or time.strftime.

Built-in methods

Methods implemented in C, like dict.get.

Methods

Functions defined in the body of a class.

Classes

When invoked, a class runs its __new__ method to create an instance, then __init__ to initialize it, and finally the instance is returned to the caller. Because there is no new operator in Python, calling a class is like calling a function. (Usually calling a class creates an instance of the same class, but other behaviors are possible by overriding __new__. We’ll see an example of this in “Flexible Object Creation with __new__”.)

Class instances

If a class defines a __call__ method, then its instances may be invoked as functions. See “User-Defined Callable Types”.

Generator functions

Functions or methods that use the yield keyword. When called, generator functions return a generator object.

Generator functions are unlike other callables in many respects. Chapter 14 is devoted to them. They can also be used as coroutines, which are covered in Chapter 16.

Tip

Given the variety of existing callable types in Python, the safest way to determine whether an object is callable is to use the callable() built-in:

>>> abs, str, 13
(<built-in function abs>, <class 'str'>, 13)
>>> [callable(obj) for obj in (abs, str, 13)]
[True, True, False]

We now move on to building class instances that work as callable objects.

User-Defined Callable Types

Not only are Python functions real objects, but arbitrary Python objects may also be made to behave like functions. Implementing a __call__ instance method is all it takes.

Example 5-8 implements a BingoCage class. An instance is built from any iterable, and stores an internal list of items, in random order. Calling the instance pops an item.

Example 5-8. bingocall.py: A BingoCage does one thing: picks items from a shuffled list

import random

class BingoCage:

    def __init__(self, items):
        self._items = list(items)
        random.shuffle(self._items)

    def pick(self):
        try:
            return self._items.pop()
        except IndexError:
            raise LookupError('pick from empty BingoCage')

    def __call__(self):
        return self.pick()

__init__ accepts any iterable; building a local copy prevents unexpected side effects on any list passed as an argument.

shuffle is guaranteed to work because self._items is a list.

The main method.

Raise exception with custom message if self._items is empty.

Shortcut to bingo.pick(): bingo().

Here is a simple demo of Example 5-8. Note how a bingo instance can be invoked as a function, and the callable(…) built-in recognizes it as a callable object:

>>> bingo = BingoCage(range(3))
>>> bingo.pick()
1
>>> bingo()
0
>>> callable(bingo)
True

A class implementing __call__ is an easy way to create function-like objects that have some internal state that must be kept across invocations, like the remaining items in the BingoCage. An example is a decorator. Decorators must be functions, but it is sometimes convenient to be able to “remember” something between calls of the decorator (e.g., for memoization—caching the results of expensive computations for later use).

A totally different approach to creating functions with internal state is to use closures. Closures, as well as decorators, are the subject of Chapter 7.

We now move on to another aspect of handling functions as objects: runtime introspection.

Function Introspection

Function objects have many attributes beyond __doc__. See what the dir function reveals about our factorial:

>>> dir(factorial)
['__annotations__', '__call__', '__class__', '__closure__', '__code__',
'__defaults__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__dir__', '__doc__', '__eq__',
'__format__', '__ge__', '__get__', '__getattribute__', '__globals__',
'__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__kwdefaults__', '__le__', '__lt__',
'__module__', '__name__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__qualname__', '__reduce__',
'__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__',
'__subclasshook__']
>>>

Most of these attributes are common to Python objects in general. In this section, we cover those that are especially relevant to treating functions as objects, starting with __dict__.

Like the instances of a plain user-defined class, a function uses the __dict__ attribute to store user attributes assigned to it. This is useful as a primitive form of annotation. Assigning arbitrary attributes to functions is not a very common practice in general, but Django is one framework that uses it. See, for example, the short_description, boolean, and allow_tags attributes described in The Django admin site documentation. In the Django docs, this example shows attaching a short_description to a method, to determine the description that will appear in record listings in the Django admin when that method is used:

    def upper_case_name(obj):
        return ("%s %s" % (obj.first_name, obj.last_name)).upper()
    upper_case_name.short_description = 'Customer name'

Now let us focus on the attributes that are specific to functions and are not found in a generic Python user-defined object. Computing the difference of two sets quickly gives us a list of the function-specific attributes (see Example 5-9).

Example 5-9. Listing attributes of functions that don’t exist in plain instances

>>> class C: pass
>>> obj = C()
>>> def func(): pass
>>> sorted(set(dir(func)) - set(dir(obj)))
['__annotations__', '__call__', '__closure__', '__code__', '__defaults__',
'__get__', '__globals__', '__kwdefaults__', '__name__', '__qualname__']
>>>

Create bare user-defined class.

Make an instance of it.

Create a bare function.

Using set difference, generate a sorted list of the attributes that exist in a function but not in an instance of a bare class.

Table 5-1 shows a summary of the attributes listed by Example 5-9.

Table 5-1. Attributes of user-defined functions

Name
Type
Description

__annotations__

dict

Parameter and return annotations

__call__

method-wrapper

Implementation of the () operator; a.k.a. the callable object protocol

__closure__

tuple

The function closure, i.e., bindings for free variables (often is None)

__code__

code

Function metadata and function body compiled into bytecode

__defaults__

tuple

Default values for the formal parameters

__get__

method-wrapper

Implementation of the read-only descriptor protocol (see Chapter 20)

__globals__

dict

Global variables of the module where the function is defined

__kwdefaults__

dict

Default values for the keyword-only formal parameters

__name__

str

The function name

__qualname__

str

The qualified function name, e.g., Random.choice (see PEP-3155)

We will discuss the __defaults__, __code__, and __annotations__ functions, used by IDEs and frameworks to extract information about function signatures, in later sections. But to fully appreciate these attributes, we will make a detour to explore the powerful syntax Python offers to declare function parameters and to pass arguments into them.

From Positional to Keyword-Only Parameters

One of the best features of Python functions is the extremely flexible parameter handling mechanism, enhanced with keyword-only arguments in Python 3. Closely related are the use of * and ** to “explode” iterables and mappings into separate arguments when we call a function. To see these features in action, see the code for Example 5-10 and tests showing its use in Example 5-11.

Example 5-10. tag generates HTML; a keyword-only argument cls is used to pass “class” attributes as a workaround because class is a keyword in Python

def tag(name, *content, cls=None, **attrs):
    """Generate one or more HTML tags"""
    if cls is not None:
        attrs['class'] = cls
    if attrs:
        attr_str = ''.join(' %s="%s"' % (attr, value)
                           for attr, value
                           in sorted(attrs.items()))
    else:
        attr_str = ''
    if content:
        return '\n'.join('<%s%s>%s</%s>' %
                         (name, attr_str, c, name) for c in content)
    else:
        return '<%s%s />' % (name, attr_str)

The tag function can be invoked in many ways, as Example 5-11 shows.

Example 5-11. Some of the many ways of calling the tag function from Example 5-10

>>> tag('br')
'<br />'
>>> tag('p', 'hello')
'<p>hello</p>'
>>> print(tag('p', 'hello', 'world'))
<p>hello</p>
<p>world</p>
>>> tag('p', 'hello', id=33)
'<p id="33">hello</p>'
>>> print(tag('p', 'hello', 'world', cls='sidebar'))
<p class="sidebar">hello</p>
<p class="sidebar">world</p>
>>> tag(content='testing', name="img")
'<img content="testing" />'
>>> my_tag = {'name': 'img', 'title': 'Sunset Boulevard',
...           'src': 'sunset.jpg', 'cls': 'framed'}
>>> tag(**my_tag)
'<img class="framed" src="sunset.jpg" title="Sunset Boulevard" />'

A single positional argument produces an empty tag with that name.

Any number of arguments after the first are captured by *content as a tuple.

Keyword arguments not explicitly named in the tag signature are captured by **attrs as a dict.

The cls parameter can only be passed as a keyword argument.

Even the first positional argument can be passed as a keyword when tag is called.

Prefixing the my_tag dict with ** passes all its items as separate arguments, which are then bound to the named parameters, with the remaining caught by **attrs.

Keyword-only arguments are a new feature in Python 3. In Example 5-10, the cls parameter can only be given as a keyword argument—it will never capture unnamed positional arguments. To specify keyword-only arguments when defining a function, name them after the argument prefixed with *. If you don’t want to support variable positional arguments but still want keyword-only arguments, put a * by itself in the signature, like this:

>>> def f(a, *, b):
...     return a, b
...
>>> f(1, b=2)
(1, 2)

Note that keyword-only arguments do not need to have a default value: they can be mandatory, like b in the preceding example.

We now move on to the introspection of function parameters, starting with a motivating example from a web framework, and on through introspection techniques.

Retrieving Information About Parameters

An interesting application of function introspection can be found in the Bobo HTTP micro-framework. To see that in action, consider a variation of the Bobo tutorial “Hello world” application in Example 5-12.

Example 5-12. Bobo knows that hello requires a person argument, and retrieves it from the HTTP request

import bobo

@bobo.query('/')
def hello(person):
    return 'Hello %s!' % person

The bobo.query decorator integrates a plain function such as hello with the request handling machinery of the framework. We’ll cover decorators in Chapter 7—that’s not the point of this example here. The point is that Bobo introspects the hello function and finds out it needs one parameter named person to work, and it will retrieve a parameter with that name from the request and pass it to hello, so the programmer does not need to touch the request object at all.

If you install Bobo and point its development server to the script in Example 5-12 (e.g., bobo -f hello.py), a hit on the URL http://localhost:8080/ will produce the message “Missing form variable person” with a 403 HTTP code. This happens because Bobo understands that the person argument is required to call hello, but no such name was found in the request. Example 5-13 is a shell session using curl to show this behavior.

Example 5-13. Bobo issues a 403 forbidden response if there are missing function arguments in the request; curl -i is used to dump the headers to standard output

$ curl -i http://localhost:8080/
HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 21:39:44 GMT
Server: WSGIServer/0.2 CPython/3.4.1
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 103

<html>
<head><title>Missing parameter</title></head>
<body>Missing form variable person</body>
</html>

However, if you get http://localhost:8080/?person=Jim, the response will be the string 'Hello Jim!'. See Example 5-14.

Example 5-14. Passing the person parameter is required for an OK response

$ curl -i http://localhost:8080/?person=Jim
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 21:42:32 GMT
Server: WSGIServer/0.2 CPython/3.4.1
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 10

Hello Jim!

How does Bobo know which parameter names are required by the function, and whether they have default values or not?

Within a function object, the __defaults__ attribute holds a tuple with the default values of positional and keyword arguments. The defaults for keyword-only arguments appear in __kwdefaults__. The names of the arguments, however, are found within the __code__ attribute, which is a reference to a code object with many attributes of its own.

To demonstrate the use of these attributes, we will inspect the function clip in a module clip.py, listed in Example 5-15.

Example 5-15. Function to shorten a string by clipping at a space near the desired length

def clip(text, max_len=80):
    """Return text clipped at the last space before or after max_len
    """
    end = None
    if len(text) > max_len:
        space_before = text.rfind(' ', 0, max_len)
        if space_before >= 0:
            end = space_before
        else:
            space_after = text.rfind(' ', max_len)
            if space_after >= 0:
                end = space_after
    if end is None:  # no spaces were found
        end = len(text)
    return text[:end].rstrip()

Example 5-16 shows the values of __defaults__, __code__.co_varnames, and __code__.co_argcount for the clip function listed in Example 5-15.

Example 5-16. Extracting information about the function arguments

>>> from clip import clip
>>> clip.__defaults__
(80,)
>>> clip.__code__  # doctest: +ELLIPSIS
<code object clip at 0x...>
>>> clip.__code__.co_varnames
('text', 'max_len', 'end', 'space_before', 'space_after')
>>> clip.__code__.co_argcount
2

As you can see, this is not the most convenient arrangement of information. The argument names appear in __code__.co_varnames, but that also includes the names of the local variables created in the body of the function. Therefore, the argument names are the first N strings, where N is given by __code__.co_argcount which—by the way—does not include any variable arguments prefixed with * or **. The default values are identified only by their position in the __defaults__ tuple, so to link each with the respective argument, you have to scan from last to first. In the example, we have two arguments, text and max_len, and one default, 80, so it must belong to the last argument, max_len. This is awkward.

Fortunately, there is a better way: the inspect module.

Take a look at Example 5-17.

Example 5-17. Extracting the function signature

>>> from clip import clip
>>> from inspect import signature
>>> sig = signature(clip)
>>> sig  # doctest: +ELLIPSIS
<inspect.Signature object at 0x...>
>>> str(sig)
'(text, max_len=80)'
>>> for name, param in sig.parameters.items():
...     print(param.kind, ':', name, '=', param.default)
...
POSITIONAL_OR_KEYWORD : text = <class 'inspect._empty'>
POSITIONAL_OR_KEYWORD : max_len = 80

This is much better. inspect.signature returns an inspect.Signature object, which has a parameters attribute that lets you read an ordered mapping of names to inspect.Parameter objects. Each Parameter instance has attributes such as name, default, and kind. The special value inspect._empty denotes parameters with no default, which makes sense considering that None is a valid—and popular—default value.

The kind attribute holds one of five possible values from the _ParameterKind class:

POSITIONAL_OR_KEYWORD

A parameter that may be passed as a positional or as a keyword argument (most Python function parameters are of this kind).

VAR_POSITIONAL

A tuple of positional parameters.

VAR_KEYWORD

A dict of keyword parameters.

KEYWORD_ONLY

A keyword-only parameter (new in Python 3).

POSITIONAL_ONLY

A positional-only parameter; currently unsupported by Python function declaration syntax, but exemplified by existing functions implemented in C—like divmod—that do not accept parameters passed by keyword.

Besides name, default, and kind, inspect.Parameter objects have an annotation attribute that is usually inspect._empty but may contain function signature metadata provided via the new annotations syntax in Python 3 (annotations are covered in the next section).

An inspect.Signature object has a bind method that takes any number of arguments and binds them to the parameters in the signature, applying the usual rules for matching actual arguments to formal parameters. This can be used by a framework to validate arguments prior to the actual function invocation. Example 5-18 shows how.

Example 5-18. Binding the function signature from the tag function in Example 5-10 to a dict of arguments

>>> import inspect
>>> sig = inspect.signature(tag)
>>> my_tag = {'name': 'img', 'title': 'Sunset Boulevard',
...           'src': 'sunset.jpg', 'cls': 'framed'}
>>> bound_args = sig.bind(**my_tag)
>>> bound_args
<inspect.BoundArguments object at 0x...>
>>> for name, value in bound_args.arguments.items():
...     print(name, '=', value)
...
name = img
cls = framed
attrs = {'title': 'Sunset Boulevard', 'src': 'sunset.jpg'}
>>> del my_tag['name']
>>> bound_args = sig.bind(**my_tag)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
TypeError: 'name' parameter lacking default value

Get the signature from tag function in Example 5-10.

Pass a dict of arguments to .bind().

An inspect.BoundArguments object is produced.

Iterate over the items in bound_args.arguments, which is an OrderedDict, to display the names and values of the arguments.

Remove the mandatory argument name from my_tag.

Calling sig.bind(**my_tag) raises a TypeError complaining of the missing name parameter.

This example shows how the Python data model, with the help of inspect, exposes the same machinery the interpreter uses to bind arguments to formal parameters in function calls.

Frameworks and tools like IDEs can use this information to validate code. Another feature of Python 3, function annotations, enhances the possible uses of this, as we will see next.

Function Annotations

Python 3 provides syntax to attach metadata to the parameters of a function declaration and its return value. Example 5-19 is an annotated version of Example 5-15. The only differences are in the first line.

Example 5-19. Annotated clip function

def clip(text:str, max_len:'int > 0'=80) -> str:
    """Return text clipped at the last space before or after max_len
    """
    end = None
    if len(text) > max_len:
        space_before = text.rfind(' ', 0, max_len)
        if space_before >= 0:
            end = space_before
        else:
            space_after = text.rfind(' ', max_len)
            if space_after >= 0:
                end = space_after
    if end is None:  # no spaces were found
        end = len(text)
    return text[:end].rstrip()

The annotated function declaration.

Each argument in the function declaration may have an annotation expression preceded by :. If there is a default value, the annotation goes between the argument name and the = sign. To annotate the return value, add -> and another expression between the ) and the : at the tail of the function declaration. The expressions may be of any type. The most common types used in annotations are classes, like str or int, or strings, like 'int > 0', as seen in the annotation for max_len in Example 5-19.

No processing is done with the annotations. They are merely stored in the __annotations__ attribute of the function, a dict:

>>> from clip_annot import clip
>>> clip.__annotations__
{'text': <class 'str'>, 'max_len': 'int > 0', 'return': <class 'str'>}

The item with key 'return' holds the return value annotation marked with -> in the function declaration in Example 5-19.

The only thing Python does with annotations is to store them in the __annotations__ attribute of the function. Nothing else: no checks, enforcement, validation, or any other action is performed. In other words, annotations have no meaning to the Python interpreter. They are just metadata that may be used by tools, such as IDEs, frameworks, and decorators. At this writing no tools that use this metadata exist in the standard library, except that inspect.signature() knows how to extract the annotations, as Example 5-20 shows.

Example 5-20. Extracting annotations from the function signature

>>> from clip_annot import clip
>>> from inspect import signature
>>> sig = signature(clip)
>>> sig.return_annotation
<class 'str'>
>>> for param in sig.parameters.values():
...     note = repr(param.annotation).ljust(13)
...     print(note, ':', param.name, '=', param.default)
<class 'str'> : text = <class 'inspect._empty'>
'int > 0'     : max_len = 80

The signature function returns a Signature object, which has a return_annotation attribute and a parameters dictionary mapping parameter names to Parameter objects. Each Parameter object has its own annotation attribute. That’s how Example 5-20 works.

In the future, frameworks such as Bobo could support annotations to further automate request processing. For example, an argument annotated as price:float may be automatically converted from a query string to the float expected by the function; a string annotation like quantity:'int > 0' might be parsed to perform conversion and validation of a parameter.

The biggest impact of function annotations will probably not be dynamic settings such as Bobo, but in providing optional type information for static type checking in tools like IDEs and linters.

After this deep dive into the anatomy of functions, the remainder of this chapter covers the most useful packages in the standard library that support functional programming.

Packages for Functional Programming

Although Guido makes it clear that Python does not aim to be a functional programming language, a functional coding style can be used to good extent, thanks to the support of packages like operator and functools, which we cover in the next two sections.

The operator Module

Often in functional programming it is convenient to use an arithmetic operator as a function. For example, suppose you want to multiply a sequence of numbers to calculate factorials without using recursion. To perform summation, you can use sum, but there is no equivalent function for multiplication. You could use reduce—as we saw in “Modern Replacements for map, filter, and reduce”—but this requires a function to multiply two items of the sequence. Example 5-21 shows how to solve this using lambda.

Example 5-21. Factorial implemented with reduce and an anonymous function

from functools import reduce

def fact(n):
    return reduce(lambda a, b: a*b, range(1, n+1))

To save you the trouble of writing trivial anonymous functions like lambda a, b: a*b, the operator module provides function equivalents for dozens of arithmetic operators. With it, we can rewrite Example 5-21 as Example 5-22.

Example 5-22. Factorial implemented with reduce and operator.mul

from functools import reduce
from operator import mul

def fact(n):
    return reduce(mul, range(1, n+1))

Another group of one-trick lambdas that operator replaces are functions to pick items from sequences or read attributes from objects: itemgetter and attrgetter actually build custom functions to do that.

Example 5-23 shows a common use of itemgetter: sorting a list of tuples by the value of one field. In the example, the cities are printed sorted by country code (field 1). Essentially, itemgetter(1) does the same as lambda fields: fields[1]: create a function that, given a collection, returns the item at index 1.

Example 5-23. Demo of itemgetter to sort a list of tuples (data from Example 2-8)

>>> metro_data = [
...     ('Tokyo', 'JP', 36.933, (35.689722, 139.691667)),
...     ('Delhi NCR', 'IN', 21.935, (28.613889, 77.208889)),
...     ('Mexico City', 'MX', 20.142, (19.433333, -99.133333)),
...     ('New York-Newark', 'US', 20.104, (40.808611, -74.020386)),
...     ('Sao Paulo', 'BR', 19.649, (-23.547778, -46.635833)),
... ]
>>>
>>> from operator import itemgetter
>>> for city in sorted(metro_data, key=itemgetter(1)):
...     print(city)
...
('Sao Paulo', 'BR', 19.649, (-23.547778, -46.635833))
('Delhi NCR', 'IN', 21.935, (28.613889, 77.208889))
('Tokyo', 'JP', 36.933, (35.689722, 139.691667))
('Mexico City', 'MX', 20.142, (19.433333, -99.133333))
('New York-Newark', 'US', 20.104, (40.808611, -74.020386))

If you pass multiple index arguments to itemgetter, the function it builds will return tuples with the extracted values:

>>> cc_name = itemgetter(1, 0)
>>> for city in metro_data:
...     print(cc_name(city))
...
('JP', 'Tokyo')
('IN', 'Delhi NCR')
('MX', 'Mexico City')
('US', 'New York-Newark')
('BR', 'Sao Paulo')
>>>

Because itemgetter uses the [] operator, it supports not only sequences but also mappings and any class that implements __getitem__.

A sibling of itemgetter is attrgetter, which creates functions to extract object attributes by name. If you pass attrgetter several attribute names as arguments, it also returns a tuple of values. In addition, if any argument name contains a . (dot), attrgetter navigates through nested objects to retrieve the attribute. These behaviors are shown in Example 5-24. This is not the shortest console session because we need to build a nested structure to showcase the handling of dotted attributes by attrgetter.

Example 5-24. Demo of attrgetter to process a previously defined list of namedtuple called metro_data (the same list that appears in Example 5-23)

>>> from collections import namedtuple
>>> LatLong = namedtuple('LatLong', 'lat long')
>>> Metropolis = namedtuple('Metropolis', 'name cc pop coord')
>>> metro_areas = [Metropolis(name, cc, pop, LatLong(lat, long))
...     for name, cc, pop, (lat, long) in metro_data]
>>> metro_areas[0]
Metropolis(name='Tokyo', cc='JP', pop=36.933, coord=LatLong(lat=35.689722,
long=139.691667))
>>> metro_areas[0].coord.lat
35.689722
>>> from operator import attrgetter
>>> name_lat = attrgetter('name', 'coord.lat')
>>>
>>> for city in sorted(metro_areas, key=attrgetter('coord.lat')):
...     print(name_lat(city))
...
('Sao Paulo', -23.547778)
('Mexico City', 19.433333)
('Delhi NCR', 28.613889)
('Tokyo', 35.689722)
('New York-Newark', 40.808611)

Use namedtuple to define LatLong.

Also define Metropolis.

Build metro_areas list with Metropolis instances; note the nested tuple unpacking to extract (lat, long) and use them to build the LatLong for the coord attribute of Metropolis.

Reach into element metro_areas[0] to get its latitude.

Define an attrgetter to retrieve the name and the coord.lat nested attribute.

Use attrgetter again to sort list of cities by latitude.

Use the attrgetter defined in to show only city name and latitude.

Here is a partial list of functions defined in operator (names starting with _ are omitted, because they are mostly implementation details):

>>> [name for name in dir(operator) if not name.startswith('_')]
['abs', 'add', 'and_', 'attrgetter', 'concat', 'contains',
'countOf', 'delitem', 'eq', 'floordiv', 'ge', 'getitem', 'gt',
'iadd', 'iand', 'iconcat', 'ifloordiv', 'ilshift', 'imod', 'imul',
'index', 'indexOf', 'inv', 'invert', 'ior', 'ipow', 'irshift',
'is_', 'is_not', 'isub', 'itemgetter', 'itruediv', 'ixor', 'le',
'length_hint', 'lshift', 'lt', 'methodcaller', 'mod', 'mul', 'ne',
'neg', 'not_', 'or_', 'pos', 'pow', 'rshift', 'setitem', 'sub',
'truediv', 'truth', 'xor']

Most of the 52 names listed are self-evident. The group of names prefixed with i and the name of another operator—e.g., iadd, iand, etc.—correspond to the augmented assignment operators—e.g., +=, &=, etc. These change their first argument in place, if it is mutable; if not, the function works like the one without the i prefix: it simply returns the result of the operation.

Of the remaining operator functions, methodcaller is the last we will cover. It is somewhat similar to attrgetter and itemgetter in that it creates a function on the fly. The function it creates calls a method by name on the object given as argument, as shown in Example 5-25.

Example 5-25. Demo of methodcaller: second test shows the binding of extra arguments

>>> from operator import methodcaller
>>> s = 'The time has come'
>>> upcase = methodcaller('upper')
>>> upcase(s)
'THE TIME HAS COME'
>>> hiphenate = methodcaller('replace', ' ', '-')
>>> hiphenate(s)
'The-time-has-come'

The first test in Example 5-25 is there just to show methodcaller at work, but if you need to use the str.upper as a function, you can just call it on the str class and pass a string as argument, like this:

>>> str.upper(s)
'THE TIME HAS COME'

The second test in Example 5-25 shows that methodcaller can also do a partial application to freeze some arguments, like the functools.partial function does. That is our next subject.

Freezing Arguments with functools.partial

The functools module brings together a handful of higher-order functions. The best known of them is probably reduce, which was covered in “Modern Replacements for map, filter, and reduce”. Of the remaining functions in functools, the most useful is partial and its variation, partialmethod.

functools.partial is a higher-order function that allows partial application of a function. Given a function, a partial application produces a new callable with some of the arguments of the original function fixed. This is useful to adapt a function that takes one or more arguments to an API that requires a callback with fewer arguments. Example 5-26 is a trivial demonstration.

Example 5-26. Using partial to use a two-argument function where a one-argument callable is required

>>> from operator import mul
>>> from functools import partial
>>> triple = partial(mul, 3)
>>> triple(7)
21
>>> list(map(triple, range(1, 10)))
[3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27]

Create new triple function from mul, binding first positional argument to 3.

Test it.

Use triple with map; mul would not work with map in this example.

A more useful example involves the unicode.normalize function that we saw in “Normalizing Unicode for Saner Comparisons”. If you work with text from many languages, you may want to apply unicode.normalize('NFC', s) to any string s before comparing or storing it. If you do that often, it’s handy to have an nfc function to do so, as in Example 5-27.

Example 5-27. Building a convenient Unicode normalizing function with partial

>>> import unicodedata, functools
>>> nfc = functools.partial(unicodedata.normalize, 'NFC')
>>> s1 = 'café'
>>> s2 = 'cafe\u0301'
>>> s1, s2
('café', 'café')
>>> s1 == s2
False
>>> nfc(s1) == nfc(s2)
True

partial takes a callable as first argument, followed by an arbitrary number of positional and keyword arguments to bind.

Example 5-28 shows the use of partial with the tag function from Example 5-10, to freeze one positional argument and one keyword argument.

Example 5-28. Demo of partial applied to the function tag from Example 5-10

>>> from tagger import tag
>>> tag
<function tag at 0x10206d1e0>
>>> from functools import partial
>>> picture = partial(tag, 'img', cls='pic-frame')
>>> picture(src='wumpus.jpeg')
'<img class="pic-frame" src="wumpus.jpeg" />'
>>> picture
functools.partial(<function tag at 0x10206d1e0>, 'img', cls='pic-frame')
>>> picture.func
<function tag at 0x10206d1e0>
>>> picture.args
('img',)
>>> picture.keywords
{'cls': 'pic-frame'}

Import tag from Example 5-10 and show its ID.

Create picture function from tag by fixing the first positional argument with 'img' and the cls keyword argument with 'pic-frame'.

picture works as expected.

partial() returns a functools.partial object.²

A functools.partial object has attributes providing access to the original function and the fixed arguments.

The functools.partialmethod function (new in Python 3.4) does the same job as partial, but is designed to work with methods.

An impressive functools function is lru_cache, which does memoization—a form of automatic optimization that works by storing the results of function calls to avoid expensive recalculations. We will cover it in Chapter 7, where decorators are explained, along with other higher-order functions designed to be used as decorators: singledispatch and wraps.

Chapter Summary

The goal of this chapter was to explore the first-class nature of functions in Python. The main ideas are that you can assign functions to variables, pass them to other functions, store them in data structures, and access function attributes, allowing frameworks and tools to act on that information. Higher-order functions, a staple of functional programming, are common in Python—even if the use of map, filter, and reduce is not as frequent as it was—thanks to list comprehensions (and similar constructs like generator expressions) and the appearance of reducing built-ins like sum, all, and any. The sorted, min, max built-ins, and functools.partial are examples of commonly used higher-order functions in the language.

Callables come in seven different flavors in Python, from the simple functions created with lambda to instances of classes implementing __call__. They can all be detected by the callable() built-in. Every callable supports the same rich syntax for declaring formal parameters, including keyword-only parameters and annotations—both new features introduced with Python 3.

Python functions and their annotations have a rich set of attributes that can be read with the help of the inspect module, which includes the Signature.bind method to apply the flexible rules that Python uses to bind actual arguments to declared parameters.

Lastly, we covered some functions from the operator module and functools.partial, which facilitate functional programming by minimizing the need for the functionally challenged lambda syntax.

Further Reading

The next two chapters continue our exploration of programming with function objects. Chapter 6 shows how first-class functions can simplify some classic object-oriented design patterns, while Chapter 7 dives into function decorators—a special kind of higher-order function—and the closure mechanism that makes them work.

Chapter 7 of the Python Cookbook, Third Edition (O’Reilly), by David Beazley and Brian K. Jones, is an excellent complement to the current chapter as well as Chapter 7 of this book, covering mostly the same concepts with a different approach.

In The Python Language Reference, “3.2. The standard type hierarchy” presents the seven callable types, along with all the other built-in types.

The Python-3-only features discussed in this chapter have their own PEPs: PEP 3102 — Keyword-Only Arguments and PEP 3107 — Function Annotations.

For more about the current (as of mid-2014) use of annotations, two Stack Overflow questions are worth reading: “What are good uses for Python3’s Function Annotations” has a practical answer and insightful comments by Raymond Hettinger, and the answer for “What good are Python function annotations?” quotes extensively from Guido van Rossum.

PEP 362 — Function Signature Object is worth reading if you intend to use the inspect module that implements that feature.

A great introduction to functional programming in Python is A. M. Kuchling’s Python Functional Programming HOWTO. The main focus of that text, however, is on the use of iterators and generators, which are the subject of Chapter 14.

fn.py is a package to support functional programming in Python 2 and 3. According to its author, Alexey Kachayev, fn.py provides “implementation of missing features to enjoy FP” in Python. It includes a @recur.tco decorator that implements tail-call optimization for unlimited recursion in Python, among many other functions, data structures, and recipes.

The StackOverflow question “Python: Why is functools.partial necessary?” has a highly informative (and funny) reply by Alex Martelli, author of the classic Python in a Nutshell.

Jim Fulton’s Bobo was probably the first web framework that deserved to be called object-oriented. If you were intrigued by it and want to learn more about its modern rewrite, start at its Introduction. A little of the early history of Bobo appears in a comment by Phillip J. Eby in a discussion at Joel Spolsky’s blog.

Soapbox

About Bobo

I owe my Python career to Bobo. I used it in my first Python web project in 1998. I discovered Bobo while looking for an object-oriented way to code web applications, after trying Perl and Java alternatives.

In 1997, Bobo had pioneered the object publishing concept: direct mapping from URLs to a hierarchy of objects, with no need to configure routes. I was hooked when I saw the beauty of this. Bobo also featured automatic HTTP query handling based on analysis of the signatures of the methods or functions used to handle requests.

Bobo was created by Jim Fulton, known as “The Zope Pope” thanks to his leading role in the development of the Zope framework, the foundation of the Plone CMS, SchoolTool, ERP5, and other large-scale Python projects. Jim is also the creator of ZODB—the Zope Object Database—a transactional object database that provides ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability), designed for ease of use from Python.

Jim has since rewritten Bobo from scratch to support WSGI and modern Python (including Python 3). As of this writing, Bobo uses the six library to do the function introspection, in order to be compatible with Python 2 and Python 3 in spite of the changes in function objects and related APIs.

Is Python a Functional Language?

Around the year 2000, I was at a training in the United States when Guido van Rossum dropped by the classroom (he was not the instructor). In the Q&A that followed, somebody asked him which features of Python were borrowed from other languages. His answer: “Everything that is good in Python was stolen from other languages.”

Shriram Krishnamurthi, professor of Computer Science at Brown University, starts his “Teaching Programming Languages in a Post-Linnaean Age” paper with this:

Programming language “paradigms” are a moribund and tedious legacy of a bygone age. Modern language designers pay them no respect, so why do our courses slavishly adhere to them?

In that paper, Python is mentioned by name in this passage:

What else to make of a language like Python, Ruby, or Perl? Their designers have no patience for the niceties of these Linnaean hierarchies; they borrow features as they wish, creating melanges that utterly defy characterization.

Krishnamurthi submits that instead of trying to classify languages in some taxonomy, it’s more useful to consider them as aggregations of features.

Even if it was not Guido’s goal, endowing Python with first-class functions opened the door to functional programming. In his post “Origins of Python’s Functional Features”, he says that map, filter, and reduce were the motivation for adding lambda to Python in the first place. All of these features were contributed together by Amrit Prem for Python 1.0 in 1994 (according to Misc/HISTORY in the CPython source code).

lambda, map, filter, and reduce first appeared in Lisp, the original functional language. However, Lisp does not limit what can be done inside a lambda, because everything in Lisp is an expression. Python uses a statement-oriented syntax in which expressions cannot contain statements, and many language constructs are statements—including try/catch, which is what I miss most often when writing lambdas. This is the price to pay for Python’s highly readable syntax.³ Lisp has many strengths, but readability is not one of them.

Ironically, stealing the list comprehension syntax from another functional language—Haskell—significantly diminished the need for map and filter, and also for lambda.

Besides the limited anonymous function syntax, the biggest obstacle to wider adoption of functional programming idioms in Python is the lack of tail-recursion elimination, an optimization that allows memory-efficient computation of a function that makes a recursive call at the “tail” of its body. In another blog post, “Tail Recursion Elimination”, Guido gives several reasons why such optimization is not a good fit for Python. That post is a great read for the technical arguments, but even more so because the first three and most important reasons given are usability issues. It is no accident that Python is a pleasure to use, learn, and teach. Guido made it so.

So there you have it: Python is, by design, not a functional language—whatever that means. Python just borrows a few good ideas from functional languages.

The Problem with Anonymous Functions

Beyond the Python-specific syntax constraints, anonymous functions have a serious drawback in every language: they have no name.

I am only half joking here. Stack traces are easier to read when functions have names. Anonymous functions are a handy shortcut, people have fun coding with them, but sometimes they get carried away—especially if the language and environment encourage deep nesting of anonymous functions, like JavaScript on Node.js. Lots of nested anonymous functions make debugging and error handling hard. Asynchronous programming in Python is more structured, perhaps because the limited lambda demands it. I promise to write more about asynchronous programming in the future, but this subject must be deferred to Chapter 18. By the way, promises, futures, and deferreds are concepts used in modern asynchronous APIs. Along with coroutines, they provide an escape from the so-called “callback hell.” We’ll see how callback-free asynchronous programming works in “From Callbacks to Futures and Coroutines”.

¹ “Origins of Python’s Functional Features”, from Guido’s The History of Python blog.

² The source code for functools.py reveals that the functools.partial class is implemented in C and is used by default. If that is not available, a pure-Python implementation of partial is available since Python 3.4.in the functools module.

³ There is also the problem of lost indentation when pasting code to Web forums, but I digress.

Chapter 6. Design Patterns with First-Class Functions

Conformity to patterns is not a measure of goodness.¹

Ralph Johnson, Coauthor of the Design Patterns classic

Although design patterns are language-independent, that does not mean every pattern applies to every language. In his 1996 presentation, “Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages”, Peter Norvig states that 16 out of the 23 patterns in the original Design Patterns book by Gamma et al. become either “invisible or simpler” in a dynamic language (slide 9). He was talking about Lisp and Dylan, but many of the relevant dynamic features are also present in Python.

The authors of Design Patterns acknowledge in their Introduction that the implementation language determines which patterns are relevant:

The choice of programming language is important because it influences one’s point of view. Our patterns assume Smalltalk/C++-level language features, and that choice determines what can and cannot be implemented easily. If we assumed procedural languages, we might have included design patterns called “Inheritance,” “Encapsulation,” and “Polymorphism.” Similarly, some of our patterns are supported directly by the less common object-oriented languages. CLOS has multi-methods, for example, which lessen the need for a pattern such as Visitor.²

In particular, in the context of languages with first-class functions, Norvig suggests rethinking the Strategy, Command, Template Method, and Visitor patterns. The general idea is: you can replace instances of some participant class in these patterns with simple functions, reducing a lot of boilerplate code. In this chapter, we will refactor Strategy using function objects, and discuss a similar approach to simplifying the Command pattern.

Case Study: Refactoring Strategy

Strategy is a good example of a design pattern that can be simpler in Python if you leverage functions as first-class objects. In the following section, we describe and implement Strategy using the “classic” structure described in Design Patterns. If you are familiar with the classic pattern, you can skip to “Function-Oriented Strategy” where we refactor the code using functions, significantly reducing the line count.

Classic Strategy

The UML class diagram in Figure 6-1 depicts an arrangement of classes that exemplifies the Strategy pattern.

Figure 6-1. UML class diagram for order discount processing implemented with the Strategy design pattern

The Strategy pattern is summarized like this in Design Patterns:

Define a family of algorithms, encapsulate each one, and make them interchangeable. Strategy lets the algorithm vary independently from clients that use it.

A clear example of Strategy applied in the ecommerce domain is computing discounts to orders according to the attributes of the customer or inspection of the ordered items.

Consider an online store with these discount rules:

Customers with 1,000 or more fidelity points get a global 5% discount per order.

A 10% discount is applied to each line item with 20 or more units in the same order.

Orders with at least 10 distinct items get a 7% global discount.

For brevity, let’s assume that only one discount may be applied to an order.

The UML class diagram for the Strategy pattern is depicted in Figure 6-1. Its participants are:

Context

Provides a service by delegating some computation to interchangeable components that implement alternative algorithms. In the ecommerce example, the context is an Order, which is configured to apply a promotional discount according to one of several algorithms.

Strategy

The interface common to the components that implement the different algorithms. In our example, this role is played by an abstract class called Promotion.

Concrete Strategy

One of the concrete subclasses of Strategy. FidelityPromo, BulkPromo, and LargeOrderPromo are the three concrete strategies implemented.

The code in Example 6-1 follows the blueprint in Figure 6-1. As described in Design Patterns, the concrete strategy is chosen by the client of the context class. In our example, before instantiating an order, the system would somehow select a promotional discount strategy and pass it to the Order constructor. The selection of the strategy is outside of the scope of the pattern.

Example 6-1. Implementation Order class with pluggable discount strategies

from abc import ABC, abstractmethod
from collections import namedtuple

Customer = namedtuple('Customer', 'name fidelity')

class LineItem:

    def __init__(self, product, quantity, price):
        self.product = product
        self.quantity = quantity
        self.price = price

    def total(self):
        return self.price * self.quantity

class Order:  # the Context

    def __init__(self, customer, cart, promotion=None):
        self.customer = customer
        self.cart = list(cart)
        self.promotion = promotion

    def total(self):
        if not hasattr(self, '__total'):
            self.__total = sum(item.total() for item in self.cart)
        return self.__total

    def due(self):
        if self.promotion is None:
            discount = 0
        else:
            discount = self.promotion.discount(self)
        return self.total() - discount

    def __repr__(self):
        fmt = '<Order total: {:.2f} due: {:.2f}>'
        return fmt.format(self.total(), self.due())

class Promotion(ABC):  # the Strategy: an abstract base class

    @abstractmethod
    def discount(self, order):
        """Return discount as a positive dollar amount"""

class FidelityPromo(Promotion):  # first Concrete Strategy
    """5% discount for customers with 1000 or more fidelity points"""

    def discount(self, order):
        return order.total() * .05 if order.customer.fidelity >= 1000 else 0

class BulkItemPromo(Promotion):  # second Concrete Strategy
    """10% discount for each LineItem with 20 or more units"""

    def discount(self, order):
        discount = 0
        for item in order.cart:
            if item.quantity >= 20:
                discount += item.total() * .1
        return discount

class LargeOrderPromo(Promotion):  # third Concrete Strategy
    """7% discount for orders with 10 or more distinct items"""

    def discount(self, order):
        distinct_items = {item.product for item in order.cart}
        if len(distinct_items) >= 10:
            return order.total() * .07
        return 0

Note that in Example 6-1, I coded Promotion as an abstract base class (ABC), to be able to use the @abstractmethod decorator, thus making the pattern more explicit.

Tip

In Python 3.4, the simplest way to declare an ABC is to subclass abc.ABC, as I did in Example 6-1. From Python 3.0 to 3.3, you must use the metaclass= keyword in the class statement (e.g., class Promotion(metaclass=ABCMeta):).

Example 6-2 shows doctests used to demonstrate and verify the operation of a module implementing the rules described earlier.

Example 6-2. Sample usage of Order class with different promotions applied

    >>> joe = Customer('John Doe', 0)
    >>> ann = Customer('Ann Smith', 1100)
    >>> cart = [LineItem('banana', 4, .5),
    ...         LineItem('apple', 10, 1.5),
    ...         LineItem('watermellon', 5, 5.0)]
    >>> Order(joe, cart, FidelityPromo())
    <Order total: 42.00 due: 42.00>
    >>> Order(ann, cart, FidelityPromo())
    <Order total: 42.00 due: 39.90>
    >>> banana_cart = [LineItem('banana', 30, .5),
    ...                LineItem('apple', 10, 1.5)]
    >>> Order(joe, banana_cart, BulkItemPromo())
    <Order total: 30.00 due: 28.50>
    >>> long_order = [LineItem(str(item_code), 1, 1.0)
    ...               for item_code in range(10)]
    >>> Order(joe, long_order, LargeOrderPromo())
    <Order total: 10.00 due: 9.30>
    >>> Order(joe, cart, LargeOrderPromo())
    <Order total: 42.00 due: 42.00>

Two customers: joe has 0 fidelity points, ann has 1,100.

One shopping cart with three line items.

The FidelityPromo promotion gives no discount to joe.

ann gets a 5% discount because she has at least 1,000 points.

The banana_cart has 30 units of the "banana" product and 10 apples.

Thanks to the BulkItemPromo, joe gets a $1.50 discount on the bananas.

long_order has 10 different items at $1.00 each.

joe gets a 7% discount on the whole order because of LargerOrderPromo.

Example 6-1 works perfectly well, but the same functionality can be implemented with less code in Python by using functions as objects. The next section shows how.

Function-Oriented Strategy

Each concrete strategy in Example 6-1 is a class with a single method, discount. Furthermore, the strategy instances have no state (no instance attributes). You could say they look a lot like plain functions, and you would be right. Example 6-3 is a refactoring of Example 6-1, replacing the concrete strategies with simple functions and removing the Promo abstract class.

Example 6-3. Order class with discount strategies implemented as functions

from collections import namedtuple

Customer = namedtuple('Customer', 'name fidelity')

class LineItem:

    def __init__(self, product, quantity, price):
        self.product = product
        self.quantity = quantity
        self.price = price

    def total(self):
        return self.price * self.quantity

class Order:  # the Context

    def __init__(self, customer, cart, promotion=None):
        self.customer = customer
        self.cart = list(cart)
        self.promotion = promotion

    def total(self):
        if not hasattr(self, '__total'):
            self.__total = sum(item.total() for item in self.cart)
        return self.__total

    def due(self):
        if self.promotion is None:
            discount = 0
        else:
            discount = self.promotion(self)
        return self.total() - discount

    def __repr__(self):
        fmt = '<Order total: {:.2f} due: {:.2f}>'
        return fmt.format(self.total(), self.due())

def fidelity_promo(order):
    """5% discount for customers with 1000 or more fidelity points"""
    return order.total() * .05 if order.customer.fidelity >= 1000 else 0

def bulk_item_promo(order):
    """10% discount for each LineItem with 20 or more units"""
    discount = 0
    for item in order.cart:
        if item.quantity >= 20:
            discount += item.total() * .1
    return discount

def large_order_promo(order):
    """7% discount for orders with 10 or more distinct items"""
    distinct_items = {item.product for item in order.cart}
    if len(distinct_items) >= 10:
        return order.total() * .07
    return 0

To compute a discount, just call the self.promotion() function.

No abstract class.

Each strategy is a function.

The code in Example 6-3 is 12 lines shorter than Example 6-1. Using the new Order is also a bit simpler, as shown in the Example 6-4 doctests.

Example 6-4. Sample usage of Order class with promotions as functions

    >>> joe = Customer('John Doe', 0)
    >>> ann = Customer('Ann Smith', 1100)
    >>> cart = [LineItem('banana', 4, .5),
    ...         LineItem('apple', 10, 1.5),
    ...         LineItem('watermellon', 5, 5.0)]
    >>> Order(joe, cart, fidelity_promo)
    <Order total: 42.00 due: 42.00>
    >>> Order(ann, cart, fidelity_promo)
    <Order total: 42.00 due: 39.90>
    >>> banana_cart = [LineItem('banana', 30, .5),
    ...                LineItem('apple', 10, 1.5)]
    >>> Order(joe, banana_cart, bulk_item_promo)
    <Order total: 30.00 due: 28.50>
    >>> long_order = [LineItem(str(item_code), 1, 1.0)
    ...               for item_code in range(10)]
    >>> Order(joe, long_order, large_order_promo)
    <Order total: 10.00 due: 9.30>
    >>> Order(joe, cart, large_order_promo)
    <Order total: 42.00 due: 42.00>

Same test fixtures as Example 6-1.

To apply a discount strategy to an Order, just pass the promotion function as an argument.

A different promotion function is used here and in the next test.

Note the callouts in Example 6-4: there is no need to instantiate a new promotion object with each new order: the functions are ready to use.

It is interesting to note that in Design Patterns the authors suggest: “Strategy objects often make good flyweights.”³ A definition of the Flyweight in another part of that work states: “A flyweight is a shared object that can be used in multiple contexts simultaneously.”⁴ The sharing is recommended to reduce the cost of creating a new concrete strategy object when the same strategy is applied over and over again with every new context—with every new Order instance, in our example. So, to overcome a drawback of the Strategy pattern—its runtime cost—the authors recommend applying yet another pattern. Meanwhile, the line count and maintenance cost of your code are piling up.

A thornier use case, with complex concrete strategies holding internal state, may require all the pieces of the Strategy and Flyweight design patterns combined. But often concrete strategies have no internal state; they only deal with data from the context. If that is the case, then by all means use plain old functions instead of coding single-method classes implementing a single-method interface declared in yet another class. A function is more lightweight than an instance of a user-defined class, and there is no need for Flyweight because each strategy function is created just once by Python when it compiles the module. A plain function is also “a shared object that can be used in multiple contexts simultaneously.”

Now that we have implemented the Strategy pattern with functions, other possibilities emerge. Suppose you want to create a “meta-strategy” that selects the best available discount for a given Order. In the following sections, we present additional refactorings that implement this requirement using a variety of approaches that leverage functions and modules as objects.

Choosing the Best Strategy: Simple Approach

Given the same customers and shopping carts from the tests in Example 6-4, we now add three additional tests in Example 6-5.

Example 6-5. The best_promo function applies all discounts and returns the largest

    >>> Order(joe, long_order, best_promo)
    <Order total: 10.00 due: 9.30>
    >>> Order(joe, banana_cart, best_promo)
    <Order total: 30.00 due: 28.50>
    >>> Order(ann, cart, best_promo)
    <Order total: 42.00 due: 39.90>

best_promo selected the larger_order_promo for customer joe.

Here joe got the discount from bulk_item_promo for ordering lots of bananas.

Checking out with a simple cart, best_promo gave loyal customer ann the discount for the fidelity_promo.

The implementation of best_promo is very simple. See Example 6-6.

Example 6-6. best_promo finds the maximum discount iterating over a list of functions

promos = [fidelity_promo, bulk_item_promo, large_order_promo]

def best_promo(order):
    """Select best discount available
    """
    return max(promo(order) for promo in promos)

promos: list of the strategies implemented as functions.

best_promo takes an instance of Order as argument, as do the other *_promo functions.

Using a generator expression, we apply each of the functions from promos to the order, and return the maximum discount computed.

Example 6-6 is straightforward: promos is a list of functions. Once you get used to the idea that functions are first-class objects, it naturally follows that building data structures holding functions often makes sense.

Although Example 6-6 works and is easy to read, there is some duplication that could lead to a subtle bug: to add a new promotion strategy, we need to code the function and remember to add it to the promos list, or else the new promotion will work when explicitly passed as an argument to Order, but will not be considered by best_promotion.

Read on for a couple of solutions to this issue.

Finding Strategies in a Module

Modules in Python are also first-class objects, and the standard library provides several functions to handle them. The built-in globals is described as follows in the Python docs:

globals()

Return a dictionary representing the current global symbol table. This is always the dictionary of the current module (inside a function or method, this is the module where it is defined, not the module from which it is called).

Example 6-7 is a somewhat hackish way of using globals to help best_promo automatically find the other available *_promo functions.

Example 6-7. The promos list is built by introspection of the module global namespace

promos = [globals()[name] for name in globals()
            if name.endswith('_promo')
            and name != 'best_promo']

def best_promo(order):
    """Select best discount available
    """
    return max(promo(order) for promo in promos)

Iterate over each name in the dictionary returned by globals().

Select only names that end with the _promo suffix.

Filter out best_promo itself, to avoid an infinite recursion.

No changes inside best_promo.

Another way of collecting the available promotions would be to create a module and put all the strategy functions there, except for best_promo.

In Example 6-8, the only significant change is that the list of strategy functions is built by introspection of a separate module called promotions. Note that Example 6-8 depends on importing the promotions module as well as inspect, which provides high-level introspection functions (the imports are not shown for brevity, because they would normally be at the top of the file).

Example 6-8. The promos list is built by introspection of a new promotions module

promos = [func for name, func in
                inspect.getmembers(promotions, inspect.isfunction)]

def best_promo(order):
    """Select best discount available
    """
    return max(promo(order) for promo in promos)

The function inspect.getmembers returns the attributes of an object—in this case, the promotions module—optionally filtered by a predicate (a boolean function). We use inspect.isfunction to get only the functions from the module.

Example 6-8 works regardless of the names given to the functions; all that matters is that the promotions module contains only functions that calculate discounts given orders. Of course, this is an implicit assumption of the code. If someone were to create a function with a different signature in the promotions module, then best_promo would break while trying to apply it to an order.

We could add more stringent tests to filter the functions, by inspecting their arguments for instance. The point of Example 6-8 is not to offer a complete solution, but to highlight one possible use of module introspection.

A more explicit alternative for dynamically collecting promotional discount functions would be to use a simple decorator. We’ll show yet another version of our ecommerce Strategy example in Chapter 7, which deals with function decorators.

In the next section, we discuss Command—another design pattern that is sometimes implemented via single-method classes when plain functions would do.

Command

Command is another design pattern that can be simplified by the use of functions passed as arguments. Figure 6-2 shows the arrangement of classes in the Command pattern.

Figure 6-2. UML class diagram for menu-driven text editor implemented with the Command design pattern. Each command may have a different receiver: the object that implements the action. For PasteCommand, the receiver is the Document. For OpenCommand, the receiver is the application.

The goal of Command is to decouple an object that invokes an operation (the Invoker) from the provider object that implements it (the Receiver). In the example from Design Patterns, each invoker is a menu item in a graphical application, and the receivers are the document being edited or the application itself.

The idea is to put a Command object between the two, implementing an interface with a single method, execute, which calls some method in the Receiver to perform the desired operation. That way the Invoker does not need to know the interface of the Receiver, and different receivers can be adapted through different Command subclasses. The Invoker is configured with a concrete command and calls its execute method to operate it. Note in Figure 6-2 that MacroCommand may store a sequence of commands; its execute() method calls the same method in each command stored.

Quoting from Gamma et al., “Commands are an object-oriented replacement for callbacks.” The question is: do we need an object-oriented replacement for callbacks? Sometimes yes, but not always.

Instead of giving the Invoker a Command instance, we can simply give it a function. Instead of calling command.execute(), the Invoker can just call command(). The MacroCommand can be implemented with a class implementing __call__. Instances of MacroCommand would be callables, each holding a list of functions for future invocation, as implemented in Example 6-9.

Example 6-9. Each instance of MacroCommand has an internal list of commands

class MacroCommand:
    """A command that executes a list of commands"""

    def __init__(self, commands):
        self.commands = list(commands)

    def __call__(self):
        for command in self.commands:
            command()

Building a list from the commands arguments ensures that it is iterable and keeps a local copy of the command references in each MacroCommand instance.

When an instance of MacroCommand is invoked, each command in self.commands is called in sequence.

More advanced uses of the Command pattern—to support undo, for example—may require more than a simple callback function. Even then, Python provides a couple of alternatives that deserve consideration:

A callable instance like MacroCommand in Example 6-9 can keep whatever state is necessary, and provide extra methods in addition to __call__.

A closure can be used to hold the internal state of a function between calls.

This concludes our rethinking of the Command pattern with first-class functions. At a high level, the approach here was similar to the one we applied to Strategy: replacing with callables the instances of a participant class that implemented a single-method interface. After all, every Python callable implements a single-method interface, and that method is named __call__.

Chapter Summary

As Peter Norvig pointed out a couple of years after the classic Design Patterns book appeared, “16 of 23 patterns have qualitatively simpler implementation in Lisp or Dylan than in C++ for at least some uses of each pattern” (slide 9 of Norvig’s “Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages” presentation). Python shares some of the dynamic features of the Lisp and Dylan languages, in particular first-class functions, our focus in this part of the book.

From the same talk quoted at the start of this chapter, in reflecting on the 20th anniversary of Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Ralph Johnson has stated that one of the failings of the book is “Too much emphasis on patterns as end-points instead of steps in the design process.”⁵ In this chapter, we used the Strategy pattern as a starting point: a working solution that we could simplify using first-class functions.

In many cases, functions or callable objects provide a more natural way of implementing callbacks in Python than mimicking the Strategy or the Command patterns as described by Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides. The refactoring of Strategy and the discussion of Command in this chapter are examples of a more general insight: sometimes you may encounter a design pattern or an API that requires that components implement an interface with a single method, and that method has a generic-sounding name such as “execute”, “run”, or “doIt”. Such patterns or APIs often can be implemented with less boilerplate code in Python using first-class functions or other callables.

The message from Peter Norvig’s design patterns slides is that the Command and Strategy patterns—along with Template Method and Visitor—can be made simpler or even “invisible” with first-class functions, at least for some applications of these patterns.

Further Reading

Our discussion of Strategy ended with a suggestion that function decorators could be used to improve on Example 6-8. We also mentioned the use of closures a couple of times in this chapter. Decorators as well as closures are the focus of Chapter 7. That chapter starts with a refactoring of the ecommerce example using a decorator to register available promotions.

“Recipe 8.21. Implementing the Visitor Pattern,” in the Python Cookbook, Third Edition (O’Reilly), by David Beazley and Brian K. Jones, presents an elegant implementation of the Visitor pattern in which a NodeVisitor class handles methods as first-class objects.

On the general topic of design patterns, the choice of readings for the Python programmer is not as broad as what is available to other language communities.

As far as I know, Learning Python Design Patterns, by Gennadiy Zlobin (Packt), is the only book entirely devoted to patterns in Python—as of June 2014. But Zlobin’s work is quite short (100 pages) and covers eight of the original 23 design patterns.

Expert Python Programming by Tarek Ziadé (Packt) is one of the best intermediate-level Python books in the market, and its final chapter, “Useful Design Patterns,” presents seven of the classic patterns from a Pythonic perspective.

Alex Martelli has given several talks about Python Design Patterns. There is a video of his EuroPython 2011 presentation and a set of slides on his personal website. I’ve found different slide decks and videos over the years, of varying lengths, so it is worthwhile to do a thorough search for his name with the words “Python Design Patterns.”

Around 2008, Bruce Eckel—author of the excellent Thinking in Java (Prentice Hall)—started a book titled Python 3 Patterns, Recipes and Idioms. It was to be written by a community of contributors led by Eckel, but six years later it’s still incomplete and apparently stalled (as I write this, the last change to the repository is two years old).

There are many books about design patterns in the context of Java, but among them the one I like most is Head First Design Patterns by Eric Freeman, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra, and Elisabeth Robson (O’Reilly). It explains 16 of the 23 classic patterns. If you like the wacky style of the Head First series and need an introduction to this topic, you will love that work. However, it is Java-centric.

For a fresh look at patterns from the point of view of a dynamic language with duck typing and first-class functions, Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen (Addison-Wesley) has many insights that are also applicable to Python. In spite of their many syntactic differences, at the semantic level Python and Ruby are closer to each other than to Java or C++.

In Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages (slides), Peter Norvig shows how first-class functions (and other dynamic features) make several of the original design patterns either simpler or unnecessary.

Of course, the original Design Patterns book by Gamma et al. is mandatory reading if you are serious about this subject. The Introduction by itself is worth the price. That is the source of the often quoted design principles “Program to an interface, not an implementation” and “Favor object composition over class inheritance.”

Soapbox

Python has first-class functions and first-class types, features that Norvig claims affect 10 of the 23 patterns (slide 10 of Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages). In the next chapter, we’ll see that Python also has generic functions (“Generic Functions with Single Dispatch”), similar to the CLOS multimethods that Gamma et al. suggest as a simpler way to implement the classic Visitor pattern. Norvig, on the other hand, says that multimethods simplify the Builder pattern (slide 10). Matching design patterns to language features is not an exact science.

In classrooms around the world, design patterns are frequently taught using Java examples. I’ve heard more than one student claim that they were led to believe that the original design patterns are useful in any implementation language. It turns out that the “classic” 23 patterns from the Gamma et al. book apply to “classic” Java very well in spite of being originally presented mostly in the context of C++—a few have Smalltalk examples in the book. But that does not mean every one of those patterns applies equally well in any language. The authors are explicit right at the beginning of their book that “some of our patterns are supported directly by the less common object-oriented languages” (recall full quote on first page of this chapter).

The Python bibliography about design patterns is very thin, compared to that of Java, C++, or Ruby. In “Further Reading” I mentioned Learning Python Design Patterns by Gennadiy Zlobin, which was published as recently as November 2013. In contrast, Russ Olsen’s Design Patterns in Ruby was published in 2007 and has 384 pages—284 more than Zlobin’s work.

Now that Python is becoming increasingly popular in academia, let’s hope more will be written about design patterns in the context of this language. Also, Java 8 introduced method references and anonymous functions, and those highly anticipated features are likely to prompt fresh approaches to patterns in Java—recognizing that as languages evolve, so must our understanding of how to apply the classic design patterns.

¹ From a slide in the talk “Root Cause Analysis of Some Faults in Design Patterns,” presented by Ralph Johnson at IME/CCSL, Universidade de São Paulo, Nov. 15, 2014.

² Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley, 1995), p. 4.

³ See page 323 of Design Patterns.

⁴ idem, p. 196

⁵ From the same talk quoted at the start of this chapter: “Root Cause Analysis of Some Faults in Design Patterns,” presented by Johnson at IME-USP, November 15, 2014.

Chapter 7. Function Decorators and Closures

There’s been a number of complaints about the choice of the name “decorator” for this feature. The major one is that the name is not consistent with its use in the GoF book.¹ The name decorator probably owes more to its use in the compiler area—a syntax tree is walked and annotated.

PEP 318 — Decorators for Functions and Methods

Function decorators let us “mark” functions in the source code to enhance their behavior in some way. This is powerful stuff, but mastering it requires understanding closures.

One of the newest reserved keywords in Python is nonlocal, introduced in Python 3.0. You can have a profitable life as a Python programmer without ever using it if you adhere to a strict regimen of class-centered object orientation. However, if you want to implement your own function decorators, you must know closures inside out, and then the need for nonlocal becomes obvious.

Aside from their application in decorators, closures are also essential for effective asynchronous programming with callbacks, and for coding in a functional style whenever it makes sense.

The end goal of this chapter is to explain exactly how function decorators work, from the simplest registration decorators to the rather more complicated parameterized ones. However, before we reach that goal we need to cover:

How Python evaluates decorator syntax

How Python decides whether a variable is local

Why closures exist and how they work

What problem is solved by nonlocal

With this grounding, we can tackle further decorator topics:

Implementing a well-behaved decorator

Interesting decorators in the standard library

Implementing a parameterized decorator

We start with a very basic introduction to decorators, and then proceed with the rest of the items listed here.

Decorators 101

A decorator is a callable that takes another function as argument (the decorated function).² The decorator may perform some processing with the decorated function, and returns it or replaces it with another function or callable object.

In other words, assuming an existing decorator named decorate, this code:

@decorate
def target():
    print('running target()')

Has the same effect as writing this:

def target():
    print('running target()')

target = decorate(target)

The end result is the same: at the end of either of these snippets, the target name does not necessarily refer to the original target function, but to whatever function is returned by decorate(target).

To confirm that the decorated function is replaced, see the console session in Example 7-1.

Example 7-1. A decorator usually replaces a function with a different one

>>> def deco(func):
...     def inner():
...         print('running inner()')
...     return inner
...
>>> @deco
... def target():
...     print('running target()')
...
>>> target()
running inner()
>>> target
<function deco.<locals>.inner at 0x10063b598>

deco returns its inner function object.

target is decorated by deco.

Invoking the decorated target actually runs inner.

Inspection reveals that target is a now a reference to inner.

Strictly speaking, decorators are just syntactic sugar. As we just saw, you can always simply call a decorator like any regular callable, passing another function. Sometimes that is actually convenient, especially when doing metaprogramming—changing program behavior at runtime.

To summarize: the first crucial fact about decorators is that they have the power to replace the decorated function with a different one. The second crucial fact is that they are executed immediately when a module is loaded. This is explained next.

When Python Executes Decorators

A key feature of decorators is that they run right after the decorated function is defined. That is usually at import time (i.e., when a module is loaded by Python). Consider registration.py in Example 7-2.

Example 7-2. The registration.py module

registry = []

def register(func):
    print('running register(%s)' % func)
    registry.append(func)
    return func

@register
def f1():
    print('running f1()')

@register
def f2():
    print('running f2()')

def f3():
    print('running f3()')

def main():
    print('running main()')
    print('registry ->', registry)
    f1()
    f2()
    f3()

if __name__=='__main__':
    main()

registry will hold references to functions decorated by @register.

register takes a function as argument.

Display what function is being decorated, for demonstration.

Include func in registry.

Return func: we must return a function; here we return the same received as argument.

f1 and f2 are decorated by @register.

f3 is not decorated.

main displays the registry, then calls f1(), f2(), and f3().

main() is only invoked if registration.py runs as a script.

The output of running registration.py as a script looks like this:

$ python3 registration.py
running register(<function f1 at 0x100631bf8>)
running register(<function f2 at 0x100631c80>)
running main()
registry -> [<function f1 at 0x100631bf8>, <function f2 at 0x100631c80>]
running f1()
running f2()
running f3()

Note that register runs (twice) before any other function in the module. When register is called, it receives as an argument the function object being decorated—for example, <function f1 at 0x100631bf8>.

After the module is loaded, the registry holds references to the two decorated functions: f1 and f2. These functions, as well as f3, are only executed when explicitly called by main.

If registration.py is imported (and not run as a script), the output is this:

>>> import registration
running register(<function f1 at 0x10063b1e0>)
running register(<function f2 at 0x10063b268>)

At this time, if you look at the registry, here is what you get:

>>> registration.registry
[<function f1 at 0x10063b1e0>, <function f2 at 0x10063b268>]

The main point of Example 7-2 is to emphasize that function decorators are executed as soon as the module is imported, but the decorated functions only run when they are explicitly invoked. This highlights the difference between what Pythonistas call import time and runtime.

Considering how decorators are commonly employed in real code, Example 7-2 is unusual in two ways:

The decorator function is defined in the same module as the decorated functions. A real decorator is usually defined in one module and applied to functions in other modules.

The register decorator returns the same function passed as argument. In practice, most decorators define an inner function and return it.

Even though the register decorator in Example 7-2 returns the decorated function unchanged, that technique is not useless. Similar decorators are used in many Python web frameworks to add functions to some central registry—for example, a registry mapping URL patterns to functions that generate HTTP responses. Such registration decorators may or may not change the decorated function. The next section shows a practical example.

Decorator-Enhanced Strategy Pattern

A registration decorator is a good enhancement to the ecommerce promotional discount from “Case Study: Refactoring Strategy”.

Recall that our main issue with Example 6-6 is the repetition of the function names in their definitions and then in the promos list used by the best_promo function to determine the highest discount applicable. The repetition is problematic because someone may add a new promotional strategy function and forget to manually add it to the promos list—in which case, best_promo will silently ignore the new strategy, introducing a subtle bug in the system. Example 7-3 solves this problem with a registration decorator.

Example 7-3. The promos list is filled by the promotion decorator

promos = []

def promotion(promo_func):
    promos.append(promo_func)
    return promo_func

@promotion
def fidelity(order):
    """5% discount for customers with 1000 or more fidelity points"""
    return order.total() * .05 if order.customer.fidelity >= 1000 else 0

@promotion
def bulk_item(order):
    """10% discount for each LineItem with 20 or more units"""
    discount = 0
    for item in order.cart:
        if item.quantity >= 20:
            discount += item.total() * .1
    return discount

@promotion
def large_order(order):
    """7% discount for orders with 10 or more distinct items"""
    distinct_items = {item.product for item in order.cart}
    if len(distinct_items) >= 10:
        return order.total() * .07
    return 0

def best_promo(order):
    """Select best discount available
    """
    return max(promo(order) for promo in promos)

The promos list starts empty.

promotion decorator returns promo_func unchanged, after adding it to the promos list.

Any function decorated by @promotion will be added to promos.

No changes needed to best_promos, because it relies on the promos list.

This solution has several advantages over the others presented in “Case Study: Refactoring Strategy”:

The promotion strategy functions don’t have to use special names (i.e., they don’t need to use the _promo suffix).

The @promotion decorator highlights the purpose of the decorated function, and also makes it easy to temporarily disable a promotion: just comment out the decorator.

Promotional discount strategies may be defined in other modules, anywhere in the system, as long as the @promotion decorator is applied to them.

Most decorators do change the decorated function. They usually do it by defining an inner function and returning it to replace the decorated function. Code that uses inner functions almost always depends on closures to operate correctly. To understand closures, we need to take a step back and have a close look at how variable scopes work in Python.

Variable Scope Rules

In Example 7-4, we define and test a function that reads two variables: a local variable a, defined as function parameter, and variable b that is not defined anywhere in the function.

Example 7-4. Function reading a local and a global variable

>>> def f1(a):
...     print(a)
...     print(b)
...
>>> f1(3)
3
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<stdin>", line 3, in f1
NameError: global name 'b' is not defined

The error we got is not surprising. Continuing from Example 7-4, if we assign a value to a global b and then call f1, it works:

>>> b = 6
>>> f1(3)
3
6

Now, let’s see an example that may surprise you.

Take a look at the f2 function in Example 7-5. Its first two lines are the same as f1 in Example 7-4, then it makes an assignment to b, and prints its value. But it fails at the second print, before the assignment is made.

Example 7-5. Variable b is local, because it is assigned a value in the body of the function

>>> b = 6
>>> def f2(a):
...     print(a)
...     print(b)
...     b = 9
...
>>> f2(3)
3
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<stdin>", line 3, in f2
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'b' referenced before assignment

Note that the output starts with 3, which proves that the print(a) statement was executed. But the second one, print(b), never runs. When I first saw this I was surprised, thinking that 6 should be printed, because there is a global variable b and the assignment to the local b is made after print(b).

But the fact is, when Python compiles the body of the function, it decides that b is a local variable because it is assigned within the function. The generated bytecode reflects this decision and will try to fetch b from the local environment. Later, when the call f2(3) is made, the body of f2 fetches and prints the value of the local variable a, but when trying to fetch the value of local variable b it discovers that b is unbound.

This is not a bug, but a design choice: Python does not require you to declare variables, but assumes that a variable assigned in the body of a function is local. This is much better than the behavior of JavaScript, which does not require variable declarations either, but if you do forget to declare that a variable is local (with var), you may clobber a global variable without knowing.

If we want the interpreter to treat b as a global variable in spite of the assignment within the function, we use the global declaration:

>>> b = 6
>>> def f3(a):
...     global b
...     print(a)
...     print(b)
...     b = 9
...
>>> f3(3)
3
6
>>> b
9

After this closer look at how variable scopes work in Python, we can tackle closures in the next section, “Closures”. If you are curious about the bytecode differences between the functions in Examples 7-4 and 7-5, see the following sidebar.

Comparing Bytecodes

The dis module provides an easy way to disassemble the bytecode of Python functions. Read Examples 7-6 and 7-7 to see the bytecodes for f1 and f2 from Examples 7-4 and 7-5.

Example 7-6. Disassembly of the f1 function from Example 7-4

>>> from dis import dis
>>> dis(f1)
  2           0 LOAD_GLOBAL              0 (print)
              3 LOAD_FAST                0 (a)
              6 CALL_FUNCTION            1 (1 positional, 0 keyword pair)
              9 POP_TOP

  3          10 LOAD_GLOBAL              0 (print)
             13 LOAD_GLOBAL              1 (b)
             16 CALL_FUNCTION            1 (1 positional, 0 keyword pair)
             19 POP_TOP
             20 LOAD_CONST               0 (None)
             23 RETURN_VALUE

Load global name print.

Load local name a.

Load global name b.

Contrast the bytecode for f1 shown in Example 7-6 with the bytecode for f2 in Example 7-7.

Example 7-7. Disassembly of the f2 function from Example 7-5

>>> dis(f2)
  2           0 LOAD_GLOBAL              0 (print)
              3 LOAD_FAST                0 (a)
              6 CALL_FUNCTION            1 (1 positional, 0 keyword pair)
              9 POP_TOP

  3          10 LOAD_GLOBAL              0 (print)
             13 LOAD_FAST                1 (b)
             16 CALL_FUNCTION            1 (1 positional, 0 keyword pair)
             19 POP_TOP

  4          20 LOAD_CONST               1 (9)
             23 STORE_FAST               1 (b)
             26 LOAD_CONST               0 (None)
             29 RETURN_VALUE

Load local name b. This shows that the compiler considers b a local variable, even if the assignment to b occurs later, because the nature of the variable—whether it is local or not—cannot change the body of the function.

The CPython VM that runs the bytecode is a stack machine, so the operations LOAD and POP refer to the stack. It is beyond the scope of this book to further describe the Python opcodes, but they are documented along with the dis module in dis — Disassembler for Python bytecode.

Closures

In the blogosphere, closures are sometimes confused with anonymous functions. The reason why many confuse them is historic: defining functions inside functions is not so common, until you start using anonymous functions. And closures only matter when you have nested functions. So a lot of people learn both concepts at the same time.

Actually, a closure is a function with an extended scope that encompasses nonglobal variables referenced in the body of the function but not defined there. It does not matter whether the function is anonymous or not; what matters is that it can access nonglobal variables that are defined outside of its body.

This is a challenging concept to grasp, and is better approached through an example.

Consider an avg function to compute the mean of an ever-increasing series of values; for example, the average closing price of a commodity over its entire history. Every day a new price is added, and the average is computed taking into account all prices so far.

Starting with a clean slate, this is how avg could be used:

>>> avg(10)
10.0
>>> avg(11)
10.5
>>> avg(12)
11.0

Where does avg come from, and where does it keep the history of previous values?

For starters, Example 7-8 is a class-based implementation.

Example 7-8. average_oo.py: A class to calculate a running average

class Averager():

    def __init__(self):
        self.series = []

    def __call__(self, new_value):
        self.series.append(new_value)
        total = sum(self.series)
        return total/len(self.series)

The Averager class creates instances that are callable:

>>> avg = Averager()
>>> avg(10)
10.0
>>> avg(11)
10.5
>>> avg(12)
11.0

Now, Example 7-9 is a functional implementation, using the higher-order function make_averager.

Example 7-9. average.py: A higher-order function to calculate a running average

def make_averager():
    series = []

    def averager(new_value):
        series.append(new_value)
        total = sum(series)
        return total/len(series)

    return averager

When invoked, make_averager returns an averager function object. Each time an averager is called, it appends the passed argument to the series, and computes the current average, as shown in Example 7-10.

Example 7-10. Testing Example 7-9

>>> avg = make_averager()
>>> avg(10)
10.0
>>> avg(11)
10.5
>>> avg(12)
11.0

Note the similarities of the examples: we call Averager() or make_averager() to get a callable object avg that will update the historical series and calculate the current mean. In Example 7-8, avg is an instance of Averager, and in Example 7-9 it is the inner function, averager. Either way, we just call avg(n) to include n in the series and get the updated mean.

It’s obvious where the avg of the Averager class keeps the history: the self.series instance attribute. But where does the avg function in the second example find the series?

Note that series is a local variable of make_averager because the initialization series = [] happens in the body of that function. But when avg(10) is called, make_averager has already returned, and its local scope is long gone.

Within averager, series is a free variable. This is a technical term meaning a variable that is not bound in the local scope. See Figure 7-1.

Figure 7-1. The closure for averager extends the scope of that function to include the binding for the free variable series.

Inspecting the returned averager object shows how Python keeps the names of local and free variables in the __code__ attribute that represents the compiled body of the function. Example 7-11 demonstrates.

Example 7-11. Inspecting the function created by make_averager in Example 7-9

>>> avg.__code__.co_varnames
('new_value', 'total')
>>> avg.__code__.co_freevars
('series',)

The binding for series is kept in the __closure__ attribute of the returned function avg. Each item in avg.__closure__ corresponds to a name in avg.__code__.co_freevars. These items are cells, and they have an attribute called cell_contents where the actual value can be found. Example 7-12 shows these attributes.

Example 7-12. Continuing from Example 7-10

>>> avg.__code__.co_freevars
('series',)
>>> avg.__closure__
(<cell at 0x107a44f78: list object at 0x107a91a48>,)
>>> avg.__closure__[0].cell_contents
[10, 11, 12]

To summarize: a closure is a function that retains the bindings of the free variables that exist when the function is defined, so that they can be used later when the function is invoked and the defining scope is no longer available.

Note that the only situation in which a function may need to deal with external variables that are nonglobal is when it is nested in another function.

The nonlocal Declaration

Our previous implementation of make_averager was not efficient. In Example 7-9, we stored all the values in the historical series and computed their sum every time averager was called. A better implementation would just store the total and the number of items so far, and compute the mean from these two numbers.

Example 7-13 is a broken implementation, just to make a point. Can you see where it breaks?

Example 7-13. A broken higher-order function to calculate a running average without keeping all history

def make_averager():
    count = 0
    total = 0

    def averager(new_value):
        count += 1
        total += new_value
        return total / count

    return averager

If you try Example 7-13, here is what you get:

>>> avg = make_averager()
>>> avg(10)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'count' referenced before assignment
>>>

The problem is that the statement count += 1 actually means the same as count = count + 1, when count is a number or any immutable type. So we are actually assigning to count in the body of averager, and that makes it a local variable. The same problem affects the total variable.

We did not have this problem in Example 7-9 because we never assigned to the series name; we only called series.append and invoked sum and len on it. So we took advantage of the fact that lists are mutable.

But with immutable types like numbers, strings, tuples, etc., all you can do is read, but never update. If you try to rebind them, as in count = count + 1, then you are implicitly creating a local variable count. It is no longer a free variable, and therefore it is not saved in the closure.

To work around this, the nonlocal declaration was introduced in Python 3. It lets you flag a variable as a free variable even when it is assigned a new value within the function. If a new value is assigned to a nonlocal variable, the binding stored in the closure is changed. A correct implementation of our newest make_averager looks like Example 7-14.

Example 7-14. Calculate a running average without keeping all history (fixed with the use of nonlocal)

def make_averager():
    count = 0
    total = 0

    def averager(new_value):
        nonlocal count, total
        count += 1
        total += new_value
        return total / count

    return averager

Getting by without nonlocal in Python 2

The lack of nonlocal in Python 2 requires workarounds, one of which is described in the third code snippet of PEP 3104 — Access to Names in Outer Scopes, which introduced nonlocal. Essentially the idea is to store the variables the inner functions need to change (e.g., count, total) as items or attributes of some mutable object, like a dict or a simple instance, and bind that object to a free variable.

Now that we have Python closures covered, we can effectively implement decorators with nested functions.

Implementing a Simple Decorator

Example 7-15 is a decorator that clocks every invocation of the decorated function and prints the elapsed time, the arguments passed, and the result of the call.

Example 7-15. A simple decorator to output the running time of functions

import time

def clock(func):
    def clocked(*args):
        t0 = time.perf_counter()
        result = func(*args)
        elapsed = time.perf_counter() - t0
        name = func.__name__
        arg_str = ', '.join(repr(arg) for arg in args)
        print('[%0.8fs] %s(%s) -> %r' % (elapsed, name, arg_str, result))
        return result
    return clocked

Define inner function clocked to accept any number of positional arguments.

This line only works because the closure for clocked encompasses the func free variable.

Return the inner function to replace the decorated function.

Example 7-16 demonstrates the use of the clock decorator.

Example 7-16. Using the clock decorator

# clockdeco_demo.py

import time
from clockdeco import clock

@clock
def snooze(seconds):
    time.sleep(seconds)

@clock
def factorial(n):
    return 1 if n < 2 else n*factorial(n-1)

if __name__=='__main__':
    print('*' * 40, 'Calling snooze(.123)')
    snooze(.123)
    print('*' * 40, 'Calling factorial(6)')
    print('6! =', factorial(6))

The output of running Example 7-16 looks like this:

$ python3 clockdeco_demo.py
**************************************** Calling snooze(123)
[0.12405610s] snooze(.123) -> None
**************************************** Calling factorial(6)
[0.00000191s] factorial(1) -> 1
[0.00004911s] factorial(2) -> 2
[0.00008488s] factorial(3) -> 6
[0.00013208s] factorial(4) -> 24
[0.00019193s] factorial(5) -> 120
[0.00026107s] factorial(6) -> 720
6! = 720

How It Works

Remember that this code:

@clock
def factorial(n):
    return 1 if n < 2 else n*factorial(n-1)

Actually does this:

def factorial(n):
    return 1 if n < 2 else n*factorial(n-1)

factorial = clock(factorial)

So, in both examples, clock gets the factorial function as its func argument (see Example 7-15). It then creates and returns the clocked function, which the Python interpreter assigns to factorial behind the scenes. In fact, if you import the clockdeco_demo module and check the __name__ of factorial, this is what you get:

>>> import clockdeco_demo
>>> clockdeco_demo.factorial.__name__
'clocked'
>>>

So factorial now actually holds a reference to the clocked function. From now on, each time factorial(n) is called, clocked(n) gets executed. In essence, clocked does the following:

Records the initial time t0.

Calls the original factorial, saving the result.

Computes the elapsed time.

Formats and prints the collected data.

Returns the result saved in step 2.

This is the typical behavior of a decorator: it replaces the decorated function with a new function that accepts the same arguments and (usually) returns whatever the decorated function was supposed to return, while also doing some extra processing.

Tip

In Design Patterns by Gamma et al., the short description of the Decorator pattern starts with: “Attach additional responsibilities to an object dynamically.” Function decorators fit that description. But at the implementation level, Python decorators bear little resemblance to the classic Decorator described in the original Design Patterns work. “Soapbox” has more on this subject.

The clock decorator implemented in Example 7-15 has a few shortcomings: it does not support keyword arguments, and it masks the __name__ and __doc__ of the decorated function. Example 7-17 uses the functools.wraps decorator to copy the relevant attributes from func to clocked. Also, in this new version, keyword arguments are correctly handled.

Example 7-17. An improved clock decorator

# clockdeco2.py

import time
import functools

def clock(func):
    @functools.wraps(func)
    def clocked(*args, **kwargs):
        t0 = time.time()
        result = func(*args, **kwargs)
        elapsed = time.time() - t0
        name = func.__name__
        arg_lst = []
        if args:
            arg_lst.append(', '.join(repr(arg) for arg in args))
        if kwargs:
            pairs = ['%s=%r' % (k, w) for k, w in sorted(kwargs.items())]
            arg_lst.append(', '.join(pairs))
        arg_str = ', '.join(arg_lst)
        print('[%0.8fs] %s(%s) -> %r ' % (elapsed, name, arg_str, result))
        return result
    return clocked

functools.wraps is just one of the ready-to-use decorators in the standard library. In the next section, we’ll meet two of the most impressive decorators that functools provides: lru_cache and singledispatch.

Decorators in the Standard Library

Python has three built-in functions that are designed to decorate methods: property, classmethod, and staticmethod. We will discuss property in “Using a Property for Attribute Validation” and the others in “classmethod Versus staticmethod”.

Another frequently seen decorator is functools.wraps, a helper for building well-behaved decorators. We used it in Example 7-17. Two of the most interesting decorators in the standard library are lru_cache and the brand-new singledispatch (added in Python 3.4). Both are defined in the functools module. We’ll cover them next.

Memoization with functools.lru_cache

A very practical decorator is functools.lru_cache. It implements memoization: an optimization technique that works by saving the results of previous invocations of an expensive function, avoiding repeat computations on previously used arguments. The letters LRU stand for Least Recently Used, meaning that the growth of the cache is limited by discarding the entries that have not been read for a while.

A good demonstration is to apply lru_cache to the painfully slow recursive function to generate the nth number in the Fibonacci sequence, as shown in Example 7-18.

Example 7-18. The very costly recursive way to compute the nth number in the Fibonacci series

from clockdeco import clock

@clock
def fibonacci(n):
    if n < 2:
        return n
    return fibonacci(n-2) + fibonacci(n-1)

if __name__=='__main__':
    print(fibonacci(6))

Here is the result of running fibo_demo.py. Except for the last line, all output is generated by the clock decorator:

$ python3 fibo_demo.py
[0.00000095s] fibonacci(0) -> 0
[0.00000095s] fibonacci(1) -> 1
[0.00007892s] fibonacci(2) -> 1
[0.00000095s] fibonacci(1) -> 1
[0.00000095s] fibonacci(0) -> 0
[0.00000095s] fibonacci(1) -> 1
[0.00003815s] fibonacci(2) -> 1
[0.00007391s] fibonacci(3) -> 2
[0.00018883s] fibonacci(4) -> 3
[0.00000000s] fibonacci(1) -> 1
[0.00000095s] fibonacci(0) -> 0
[0.00000119s] fibonacci(1) -> 1
[0.00004911s] fibonacci(2) -> 1
[0.00009704s] fibonacci(3) -> 2
[0.00000000s] fibonacci(0) -> 0
[0.00000000s] fibonacci(1) -> 1
[0.00002694s] fibonacci(2) -> 1
[0.00000095s] fibonacci(1) -> 1
[0.00000095s] fibonacci(0) -> 0
[0.00000095s] fibonacci(1) -> 1
[0.00005102s] fibonacci(2) -> 1
[0.00008917s] fibonacci(3) -> 2
[0.00015593s] fibonacci(4) -> 3
[0.00029993s] fibonacci(5) -> 5
[0.00052810s] fibonacci(6) -> 8
8

The waste is obvious: fibonacci(1) is called eight times, fibonacci(2) five times, etc. But if we just add two lines to use lru_cache, performance is much improved. See Example 7-19.

Example 7-19. Faster implementation using caching

import functools

from clockdeco import clock

@functools.lru_cache()
@clock
def fibonacci(n):
    if n < 2:
        return n
    return fibonacci(n-2) + fibonacci(n-1)

if __name__=='__main__':
    print(fibonacci(6))

Note that lru_cache must be invoked as a regular function—note the parentheses in the line: @functools.lru_cache(). The reason is that it accepts configuration parameters, as we’ll see shortly.

This is an example of stacked decorators: @lru_cache() is applied on the function returned by @clock.

Execution time is halved, and the function is called only once for each value of n:

$ python3 fibo_demo_lru.py
[0.00000119s] fibonacci(0) -> 0
[0.00000119s] fibonacci(1) -> 1
[0.00010800s] fibonacci(2) -> 1
[0.00000787s] fibonacci(3) -> 2
[0.00016093s] fibonacci(4) -> 3
[0.00001216s] fibonacci(5) -> 5
[0.00025296s] fibonacci(6) -> 8

In another test, to compute fibonacci(30), Example 7-19 made the 31 calls needed in 0.0005s, while the uncached Example 7-18 called fibonacci 2,692,537 times and took 17.7 seconds in an Intel Core i7 notebook.

Besides making silly recursive algorithms viable, lru_cache really shines in applications that need to fetch information from the Web.

It’s important to note that lru_cache can be tuned by passing two optional arguments. Its full signature is:

functools.lru_cache(maxsize=128, typed=False)

The maxsize argument determines how many call results are stored. After the cache is full, older results are discarded to make room. For optimal performance, maxsize should be a power of 2. The typed argument, if set to True, stores results of different argument types separately, i.e., distinguishing between float and integer arguments that are normally considered equal, like 1 and 1.0. By the way, because lru_cache uses a dict to store the results, and the keys are made from the positional and keyword arguments used in the calls, all the arguments taken by the decorated function must be hashable.

Now let’s consider the intriguing functools.singledispatch decorator.

Generic Functions with Single Dispatch

Imagine we are creating a tool to debug web applications. We want to be able to generate HTML displays for different types of Python objects.

We could start with a function like this:

import html

def htmlize(obj):
    content = html.escape(repr(obj))
    return '<pre>{}</pre>'.format(content)

That will work for any Python type, but now we want to extend it to generate custom displays for some types:

str: replace embedded newline characters with '<br>\n' and use <p> tags instead of <pre>.

int: show the number in decimal and hexadecimal.

list: output an HTML list, formatting each item according to its type.

The behavior we want is shown in Example 7-20.

Example 7-20. htmlize generates HTML tailored to different object types

>>> htmlize({1, 2, 3})
'<pre>{1, 2, 3}</pre>'
>>> htmlize(abs)
'<pre>&lt;built-in function abs&gt;</pre>'
>>> htmlize('Heimlich & Co.\n- a game')
'<p>Heimlich &amp; Co.<br>\n- a game</p>'
>>> htmlize(42)
'<pre>42 (0x2a)</pre>'
>>> print(htmlize(['alpha', 66, {3, 2, 1}]))
<ul>
<li><p>alpha</p></li>
<li><pre>66 (0x42)</pre></li>
<li><pre>{1, 2, 3}</pre></li>
</ul>

By default, the HTML-escaped repr of an object is shown enclosed in <pre></pre>.

str objects are also HTML-escaped but wrapped in <p></p> with <br> line breaks.

An int is shown in decimal and hexadecimal, inside <pre></pre>.

Each list item is formatted according to its type, and the whole sequence rendered as an HTML list.

Because we don’t have method or function overloading in Python, we can’t create variations of htmlize with different signatures for each data type we want to handle differently. A common solution in Python would be to turn htmlize into a dispatch function, with a chain of if/elif/elif calling specialized functions like htmlize_str, htmlize_int, etc. This is not extensible by users of our module, and is unwieldy: over time, the htmlize dispatcher would become too big, and the coupling between it and the specialized functions would be very tight.

The new functools.singledispatch decorator in Python 3.4 allows each module to contribute to the overall solution, and lets you easily provide a specialized function even for classes that you can’t edit. If you decorate a plain function with @singledispatch, it becomes a generic function: a group of functions to perform the same operation in different ways, depending on the type of the first argument.³ Example 7-21 shows how.

Tip

functools.singledispatch was added in Python 3.4, but the singledispatch package available on PyPI is a backport compatible with Python 2.6 to 3.3.

Example 7-21. singledispatch creates a custom htmlize.register to bundle several functions into a generic function

from functools import singledispatch
from collections import abc
import numbers
import html

@singledispatch
def htmlize(obj):
    content = html.escape(repr(obj))
    return '<pre>{}</pre>'.format(content)

@htmlize.register(str)
def _(text):
    content = html.escape(text).replace('\n', '<br>\n')
    return '<p>{0}</p>'.format(content)

@htmlize.register(numbers.Integral)
def _(n):
    return '<pre>{0} (0x{0:x})</pre>'.format(n)

@htmlize.register(tuple)
@htmlize.register(abc.MutableSequence)
def _(seq):
    inner = '</li>\n<li>'.join(htmlize(item) for item in seq)
    return '<ul>\n<li>' + inner + '</li>\n</ul>'

@singledispatch marks the base function that handles the object type.

Each specialized function is decorated with @«base_function».register(«type»).

The name of the specialized functions is irrelevant; _ is a good choice to make this clear.

For each additional type to receive special treatment, register a new function. numbers.Integral is a virtual superclass of int.

You can stack several register decorators to support different types with the same function.

When possible, register the specialized functions to handle ABCs (abstract classes) such as numbers.Integral and abc.MutableSequence instead of concrete implementations like int and list. This allows your code to support a greater variety of compatible types. For example, a Python extension can provide alternatives to the int type with fixed bit lengths as subclasses of numbers.Integral.

Tip

Using ABCs for type checking allows your code to support existing or future classes that are either actual or virtual subclasses of those ABCs. The use of ABCs and the concept of a virtual subclass are subjects of Chapter 11.

A notable quality of the singledispatch mechanism is that you can register specialized functions anywhere in the system, in any module. If you later add a module with a new user-defined type, you can easily provide a new custom function to handle that type. And you can write custom functions for classes that you did not write and can’t change.

singledispatch is a well-thought-out addition to the standard library, and it offers more features than we can describe here. The best documentation for it is PEP 443 — Single-dispatch generic functions.

Note

@singledispatch is not designed to bring Java-style method overloading to Python. A single class with many overloaded variations of a method is better than a single function with a lengthy stretch of if/elif/elif/elif blocks. But both solutions are flawed because they concentrate too much responsibility in a single code unit—the class or the function. The advantage of @singledispath is supporting modular extension: each module can register a specialized function for each type it supports.

Decorators are functions and therefore they may be composed (i.e., you can apply a decorator to a function that is already decorated, as shown in Example 7-21). The next section explains how that works.

Stacked Decorators

Example 7-19 demonstrated the use of stacked decorators: @lru_cache is applied on the result of @clock over fibonacci. In Example 7-21, the @htmlize.register decorator was applied twice to the last function in the module.

When two decorators @d1 and @d2 are applied to a function f in that order, the result is the same as f = d1(d2(f)).

In other words, this:

@d1
@d2
def f():
    print('f')

Is the same as:

def f():
    print('f')

f = d1(d2(f))

Besides stacked decorators, this chapter has shown some decorators that take arguments, for example, @lru_cache() and the htmlize.register(«type») produced by @singledispatch in Example 7-21. The next section shows how to build decorators that accept parameters.

Parameterized Decorators

When parsing a decorator in source code, Python takes the decorated function and passes it as the first argument to the decorator function. So how do you make a decorator accept other arguments? The answer is: make a decorator factory that takes those arguments and returns a decorator, which is then applied to the function to be decorated. Confusing? Sure. Let’s start with an example based on the simplest decorator we’ve seen: register in Example 7-22.

Example 7-22. Abridged registration.py module from Example 7-2, repeated here for convenience

registry = []

def register(func):
    print('running register(%s)' % func)
    registry.append(func)
    return func

@register
def f1():
    print('running f1()')

print('running main()')
print('registry ->', registry)
f1()

A Parameterized Registration Decorator

In order to make it easy to enable or disable the function registration performed by register, we’ll make it accept an optional active parameter which, if False, skips registering the decorated function. Example 7-23 shows how. Conceptually, the new register function is not a decorator but a decorator factory. When called, it returns the actual decorator that will be applied to the target function.

Example 7-23. To accept parameters, the new register decorator must be called as a function

registry = set()

def register(active=True):
    def decorate(func):
        print('running register(active=%s)->decorate(%s)'
              % (active, func))
        if active:
            registry.add(func)
        else:
            registry.discard(func)

        return func
    return decorate

@register(active=False)
def f1():
    print('running f1()')

@register()
def f2():
    print('running f2()')

def f3():
    print('running f3()')

registry is now a set, so adding and removing functions is faster.

register takes an optional keyword argument.

The decorate inner function is the actual decorator; note how it takes a function as argument.

Register func only if the active argument (retrieved from the closure) is True.

If not active and func in registry, remove it.

Because decorate is a decorator, it must return a function.

register is our decorator factory, so it returns decorate.

The @register factory must be invoked as a function, with the desired parameters.

If no parameters are passed, register must still be called as a function—@register()—i.e., to return the actual decorator, decorate.

The main point is that register() returns decorate, which is then applied to the decorated function.

The code in Example 7-23 is in a registration_param.py module. If we import it, this is what we get:

>>> import registration_param
running register(active=False)->decorate(<function f1 at 0x10063c1e0>)
running register(active=True)->decorate(<function f2 at 0x10063c268>)
>>> registration_param.registry
[<function f2 at 0x10063c268>]

Note how only the f2 function appears in the registry; f1 does not appear because active=False was passed to the register decorator factory, so the decorate that was applied to f1 did not add it to the registry.

If, instead of using the @ syntax, we used register as a regular function, the syntax needed to decorate a function f would be register()(f) to add f to the registry, or register(active=False)(f) to not add it (or remove it). See Example 7-24 for a demo of adding and removing functions to the registry.

Example 7-24. Using the registration_param module listed in Example 7-23

>>> from registration_param import *
running register(active=False)->decorate(<function f1 at 0x10073c1e0>)
running register(active=True)->decorate(<function f2 at 0x10073c268>)
>>> registry
{<function f2 at 0x10073c268>}
>>> register()(f3)
running register(active=True)->decorate(<function f3 at 0x10073c158>)
<function f3 at 0x10073c158>
>>> registry
{<function f3 at 0x10073c158>, <function f2 at 0x10073c268>}
>>> register(active=False)(f2)
running register(active=False)->decorate(<function f2 at 0x10073c268>)
<function f2 at 0x10073c268>
>>> registry
{<function f3 at 0x10073c158>}

When the module is imported, f2 is in the registry.

The register() expression returns decorate, which is then applied to f3.

The previous line added f3 to the registry.

This call removes f2 from the registry.

Confirm that only f3 remains in the registry.

The workings of parameterized decorators are fairly involved, and the one we’ve just discussed is simpler than most. Parameterized decorators usually replace the decorated function, and their construction requires yet another level of nesting. Touring such function pyramids is our next adventure.

The Parameterized Clock Decorator

In this section, we’ll revisit the clock decorator, adding a feature: users may pass a format string to control the output of the decorated function. See Example 7-25.

Note

For simplicity, Example 7-25 is based on the initial clock implementation from Example 7-15, and not the improved one from Example 7-17 that uses @functools.wraps, adding yet another function layer.

Example 7-25. Module clockdeco_param.py: the parameterized clock decorator

import time

DEFAULT_FMT = '[{elapsed:0.8f}s] {name}({args}) -> {result}'

def clock(fmt=DEFAULT_FMT):
    def decorate(func):
        def clocked(*_args):
            t0 = time.time()
            _result = func(*_args)
            elapsed = time.time() - t0
            name = func.__name__
            args = ', '.join(repr(arg) for arg in _args)
            result = repr(_result)
            print(fmt.format(**locals()))
            return _result
        return clocked
    return decorate

if __name__ == '__main__':

    @clock()
    def snooze(seconds):
        time.sleep(seconds)

    for i in range(3):
        snooze(.123)

clock is our parameterized decorator factory.

decorate is the actual decorator.

clocked wraps the decorated function.

_result is the actual result of the decorated function.

_args holds the actual arguments of clocked, while args is str used for display.

result is the str representation of _result, for display.

Using **locals() here allows any local variable of clocked to be referenced in the fmt.

clocked will replace the decorated function, so it should return whatever that function returns.

decorate returns clocked.

clock returns decorate.

In this self test, clock() is called without arguments, so the decorator applied will use the default format str.

If you run Example 7-25 from the shell, this is what you get:

$ python3 clockdeco_param.py
[0.12412500s] snooze(0.123) -> None
[0.12411904s] snooze(0.123) -> None
[0.12410498s] snooze(0.123) -> None

To exercise the new functionality, Examples 7-26 and 7-27 are two other modules using clockdeco_param, and the outputs they generate.

Example 7-26. clockdeco_param_demo1.py

import time
from clockdeco_param import clock

@clock('{name}: {elapsed}s')
def snooze(seconds):
    time.sleep(seconds)

for i in range(3):
    snooze(.123)

Output of Example 7-26:

$ python3 clockdeco_param_demo1.py
snooze: 0.12414693832397461s
snooze: 0.1241159439086914s
snooze: 0.12412118911743164s

Example 7-27. clockdeco_param_demo2.py

import time
from clockdeco_param import clock

@clock('{name}({args}) dt={elapsed:0.3f}s')
def snooze(seconds):
    time.sleep(seconds)

for i in range(3):
    snooze(.123)

Output of Example 7-27:

$ python3 clockdeco_param_demo2.py
snooze(0.123) dt=0.124s
snooze(0.123) dt=0.124s
snooze(0.123) dt=0.124s

This ends our exploration of decorators as far as space permits within the scope of this book. See “Further Reading”, in particular Graham Dumpleton’s blog and wrapt module for industrial-strength techniques when building decorators.

Note

Graham Dumpleton and Lennart Regebro—one of this book’s technical reviewers—argue that decorators are best coded as classes implementing __call__, and not as functions like the examples in this chapter. I agree that approach is better for non-trivial decorators, but to explain the basic idea of this language feature, functions are easier to understand.

Chapter Summary

We covered a lot of ground in this chapter, but I tried to make the journey as smooth as possible even if the terrain is rugged. After all, we did enter the realm of metaprogramming.

We started with a simple @register decorator without an inner function, and finished with a parameterized @clock() involving two levels of nested functions.

Registration decorators, though simple in essence, have real applications in advanced Python frameworks. We applied the registration idea to an improvement of our Strategy design pattern refactoring from Chapter 6.

Parameterized decorators almost aways involve at least two nested functions, maybe more if you want to use @functools.wraps to produce a decorator that provides better support for more advanced techniques. One such technique is stacked decorators, which we briefly covered.

We also visited two awesome function decorators provided in the functools module of standard library: @lru_cache() and @singledispatch.

Understanding how decorators actually work required covering the difference between import time and runtime, then diving into variable scoping, closures, and the new nonlocal declaration. Mastering closures and nonlocal is valuable not only to build decorators, but also to code event-oriented programs for GUIs or asynchronous I/O with callbacks.

Further Reading

Chapter 9, “Metaprogramming,” of the Python Cookbook, Third Edition by David Beazley and Brian K. Jones (O’Reilly), has several recipes from elementary decorators to very sophisticated ones, including one that can be called as a regular decorator or as a decorator factory, e.g., @clock or @clock(). That’s “Recipe 9.6. Defining a Decorator That Takes an Optional Argument” in that cookbook.

Graham Dumpleton has a series of in-depth blog posts about techniques for implementing well-behaved decorators, starting with “How You Implemented Your Python Decorator is Wrong”. His deep expertise in this matter is also nicely packaged in the wrapt module he wrote to simplify the implementation of decorators and dynamic function wrappers, which support introspection and behave correctly when further decorated, when applied to methods and when used as descriptors. (Descriptors are the subject of chapter Chapter 20.)

Michele Simionato authored a package aiming to “simplify the usage of decorators for the average programmer, and to popularize decorators by showing various non-trivial examples,” according to the docs. It’s available on PyPI as the decorator package.

Created when decorators were still a new feature in Python, the Python Decorator Library wiki page has dozens of examples. Because that page started years ago, some of the techniques shown have been superseded, but the page is still an excellent source of inspiration.

PEP 443 provides the rationale and a detailed description of the single-dispatch generic functions’ facility. An old (March 2005) blog post by Guido van Rossum, “Five-Minute Multimethods in Python”, walks through an implementation of generic functions (a.k.a. multimethods) using decorators. His code supports multiple-dispatch (i.e., dispatch based on more than one positional argument). Guido’s multimethods code is interesting, but it’s a didactic example. For a modern, production-ready implementation of multiple-dispatch generic functions, check out Reg by Martijn Faassen—author of the model-driven and REST-savvy Morepath web framework.

“Closures in Python” is a short blog post by Fredrik Lundh that explains the terminology of closures.

PEP 3104 — Access to Names in Outer Scopes describes the introduction of the nonlocal declaration to allow rebinding of names that are neither local nor global. It also includes an excellent overview of how this issue is resolved in other dynamic languages (Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, etc.) and the pros and cons of the design options available to Python.

On a more theoretical level, PEP 227 — Statically Nested Scopes documents the introduction of lexical scoping as an option in Python 2.1 and as a standard in Python 2.2, explaining the rationale and design choices for the implementation of closures in Python.

Soapbox

The designer of any language with first-class functions faces this issue: being first-class objects, functions are defined in a certain scope but may be invoked in other scopes. The question is: how to evaluate the free variables? The first and simplest answer is “dynamic scope.” This means that free variables are evaluated by looking into the environment where the function is invoked.

If Python had dynamic scope and no closures, we could improvise avg—similar to Example 7-9—like this:

>>> ### this is not a real Python console session! ###
>>> avg = make_averager()
>>> series = []
>>> avg(10)
10.0
>>> avg(11)
10.5
>>> avg(12)
11.0
>>> series = [1]
>>> avg(5)
3.0

Before using avg, we have to define series = [] ourselves, so we must know that averager (inside make_averager) refers to a list by that name.

Behind the scenes, series is used to accumulate the values to be averaged.

When series = [1] is executed, the previous list is lost. This could happen by accident, when handling two independent running averages at the same time.

Functions should be black boxes, with their implementation hidden from users. But with dynamic scope, if a function uses free variables, the programmer has to know its internals to set up an environment where it works correctly.

On the other hand, dynamic scope is easier to implement, which is probably why it was the path taken by John McCarthy when he created Lisp, the first language to have first-class functions. Paul Graham’s article “The Roots of Lisp” is an accessible explanation of John McCarthy’s original paper about the Lisp language: “Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I”. McCarthy’s paper is a masterpiece as great as Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Paul Graham translated it for the rest of us, from mathematics to English and running code.

Paul Graham’s commentary also shows how tricky dynamic scoping is. Quoting from “The Roots of Lisp”:

It’s an eloquent testimony to the dangers of dynamic scope that even the very first example of higher-order Lisp functions was broken because of it. It may be that McCarthy was not fully aware of the implications of dynamic scope in 1960. Dynamic scope remained in Lisp implementations for a surprisingly long time—until Sussman and Steele developed Scheme in 1975. Lexical scope does not complicate the definition of eval very much, but it may make compilers harder to write.

Today, lexical scope is the norm: free variables are evaluated considering the environment where the function is defined. Lexical scope complicates the implementation of languages with first-class functions, because it requires the support of closures. On the other hand, lexical scope makes source code easier to read. Most languages invented since Algol have lexical scope.

For many years, Python lambdas did not provide closures, contributing to the bad name of this feature among functional-programming geeks in the blogosphere. This was fixed in Python 2.2 (December 2001), but the blogosphere has a long memory. Since then, lambda is embarrassing only because of its limited syntax.

Python Decorators and the Decorator Design Pattern

Python function decorators fit the general description of Decorator given by Gamma et al. in Design Patterns: “Attach additional responsibilities to an object dynamically. Decorators provide a flexible alternative to subclassing for extending functionality.”

At the implementation level, Python decorators do not resemble the classic Decorator design pattern, but an analogy can be made.

In the design pattern, Decorator and Component are abstract classes. An instance of a concrete decorator wraps an instance of a concrete component in order to add behaviors to it. Quoting from Design Patterns:

The decorator conforms to the interface of the component it decorates so that its presence is transparent to the component’s clients. The decorator forwards requests to the component and may perform additional actions (such as drawing a border) before or after forwarding. Transparency lets you nest decorators recursively, thereby allowing an unlimited number of added responsibilities.” (p. 175)

In Python, the decorator function plays the role of a concrete Decorator subclass, and the inner function it returns is a decorator instance. The returned function wraps the function to be decorated, which is analogous to the component in the design pattern. The returned function is transparent because it conforms to the interface of the component by accepting the same arguments. It forwards calls to the component and may perform additional actions either before or after it. Borrowing from the previous citation, we can adapt the last sentence to say that “Transparency lets you nest decorators recursively, thereby allowing an unlimited number of added behaviors.” That is what enable stacked decorators to work.

Note that I am not suggesting that function decorators should be used to implement the Decorator pattern in Python programs. Although this can be done in specific situations, in general the Decorator pattern is best implemented with classes to represent the Decorator and the components it will wrap.

¹ That’s the 1995 Design Patterns book by the so-called Gang of Four.

² Python also supports class decorators. They are covered in Chapter 21.

³ This is what is meant by the term single-dispatch. If more arguments were used to select the specific functions, we’d have multiple-dispatch.

Part IV. Object-Oriented Idioms

Chapter 8. Object References, Mutability, and Recycling

‘You are sad,’ the Knight said in an anxious tone: ‘let me sing you a song to comfort you. […] The name of the song is called “HADDOCKS’ EYES”.’

‘Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?’ Alice said, trying to feel interested.

‘No, you don’t understand,’ the Knight said, looking a little vexed. ‘That’s what the name is CALLED. The name really IS “THE AGED AGED MAN."’ (adapted from Chapter VIII. ‘It’s my own Invention’).

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

Alice and the Knight set the tone of what we will see in this chapter. The theme is the distinction between objects and their names. A name is not the object; a name is a separate thing.

We start the chapter by presenting a metaphor for variables in Python: variables are labels, not boxes. If reference variables are old news to you, the analogy may still be handy if you need to explain aliasing issues to others.

We then discuss the concepts of object identity, value, and aliasing. A surprising trait of tuples is revealed: they are immutable but their values may change. This leads to a discussion of shallow and deep copies. References and function parameters are our next theme: the problem with mutable parameter defaults and the safe handling of mutable arguments passed by clients of our functions.

The last sections of the chapter cover garbage collection, the del command, and how to use weak references to “remember” objects without keeping them alive.

This is a rather dry chapter, but its topics lie at the heart of many subtle bugs in real Python programs.

Let’s start by unlearning that a variable is like a box where you store data.

Variables Are Not Boxes

In 1997, I took a summer course on Java at MIT. The professor, Lynn Andrea Stein—an award-winning computer science educator who currently teaches at Olin College of Engineering—made the point that the usual “variables as boxes” metaphor actually hinders the understanding of reference variables in OO languages. Python variables are like reference variables in Java, so it’s better to think of them as labels attached to objects.

Example 8-1 is a simple interaction that the “variables as boxes” idea cannot explain. Figure 8-1 illustrates why the box metaphor is wrong for Python, while sticky notes provide a helpful picture of how variables actually work.

Example 8-1. Variables a and b hold references to the same list, not copies of the list

>>> a = [1, 2, 3]
>>> b = a
>>> a.append(4)
>>> b
[1, 2, 3, 4]

Figure 8-1. If you imagine variables are like boxes, you can’t make sense of assignment in Python; instead, think of variables as sticky notes—Example 8-1 then becomes easy to explain

Prof. Stein also spoke about assignment in a very deliberate way. For example, when talking about a seesaw object in a simulation, she would say: “Variable s is assigned to the seesaw,” but never “The seesaw is assigned to variable s.” With reference variables, it makes much more sense to say that the variable is assigned to an object, and not the other way around. After all, the object is created before the assignment. Example 8-2 proves that the righthand side of an assignment happens first.

Example 8-2. Variables are assigned to objects only after the objects are created

>>> class Gizmo:
...    def __init__(self):
...         print('Gizmo id: %d' % id(self))
...
>>> x = Gizmo()
Gizmo id: 4301489152
>>> y = Gizmo() * 10
Gizmo id: 4301489432
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for *: 'Gizmo' and 'int'
>>>
>>> dir()
['Gizmo', '__builtins__', '__doc__', '__loader__', '__name__',
'__package__', '__spec__', 'x']

The output Gizmo id: ... is a side effect of creating a Gizmo instance.

Multiplying a Gizmo instance will raise an exception.

Here is proof that a second Gizmo was actually instantiated before the multiplication was attempted.

But variable y was never created, because the exception happened while the right-hand side of the assignment was being evaluated.

Tip

To understand an assignment in Python, always read the right-hand side first: that’s where the object is created or retrieved. After that, the variable on the left is bound to the object, like a label stuck to it. Just forget about the boxes.

Because variables are mere labels, nothing prevents an object from having several labels assigned to it. When that happens, you have aliasing, our next topic.

Identity, Equality, and Aliases

Lewis Carroll is the pen name of Prof. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Mr. Carroll is not only equal to Prof. Dodgson: they are one and the same. Example 8-3 expresses this idea in Python.

Example 8-3. charles and lewis refer to the same object

>>> charles = {'name': 'Charles L. Dodgson', 'born': 1832}
>>> lewis = charles
>>> lewis is charles
True
>>> id(charles), id(lewis)
(4300473992, 4300473992)
>>> lewis['balance'] = 950
>>> charles
{'name': 'Charles L. Dodgson', 'balance': 950, 'born': 1832}

lewis is an alias for charles.

The is operator and the id function confirm it.

Adding an item to lewis is the same as adding an item to charles.

However, suppose an impostor—let’s call him Dr. Alexander Pedachenko—claims he is Charles L. Dodgson, born in 1832. His credentials may be the same, but Dr. Pedachenko is not Prof. Dodgson. Figure 8-2 illustrates this scenario.

Figure 8-2. charles and lewis are bound to the same object; alex is bound to a separate object of equal contents

Example 8-4 implements and tests the alex object depicted in Figure 8-2.

Example 8-4. alex and charles compare equal, but alex is not charles

>>> alex = {'name': 'Charles L. Dodgson', 'born': 1832, 'balance': 950}
>>> alex == charles
True
>>> alex is not charles
True

alex refers to an object that is a replica of the object assigned to charles.

The objects compare equal, because of the __eq__ implementation in the dict class.

But they are distinct objects. This is the Pythonic way of writing the negative identity comparison: a is not b.

Example 8-3 is an example of aliasing. In that code, lewis and charles are aliases: two variables bound to the same object. On the other hand, alex is not an alias for charles: these variables are bound to distinct objects. The objects bound to alex and charles have the same value—that’s what == compares—but they have different identities.

In The Python Language Reference, “3.1. Objects, values and types” states:

Every object has an identity, a type and a value. An object’s identity never changes once it has been created; you may think of it as the object’s address in memory. The is operator compares the identity of two objects; the id() function returns an integer representing its identity.

The real meaning of an object’s ID is implementation-dependent. In CPython, id() returns the memory address of the object, but it may be something else in another Python interpreter. The key point is that the ID is guaranteed to be a unique numeric label, and it will never change during the life of the object.

In practice, we rarely use the id() function while programming. Identity checks are most often done with the is operator, and not by comparing IDs. Next, we’ll talk about is versus ==.

Choosing Between == and is

The == operator compares the values of objects (the data they hold), while is compares their identities.

We often care about values and not identities, so == appears more frequently than is in Python code.

However, if you are comparing a variable to a singleton, then it makes sense to use is. By far, the most common case is checking whether a variable is bound to None. This is the recommended way to do it:

x is None

And the proper way to write its negation is:

x is not None

The is operator is faster than ==, because it cannot be overloaded, so Python does not have to find and invoke special methods to evaluate it, and computing is as simple as comparing two integer IDs. In contrast, a == b is syntactic sugar for a.__eq__(b). The __eq__ method inherited from object compares object IDs, so it produces the same result as is. But most built-in types override __eq__ with more meaningful implementations that actually take into account the values of the object attributes. Equality may involve a lot of processing—for example, when comparing large collections or deeply nested structures.

To wrap up this discussion of identity versus equality, we’ll see that the famously immutable tuple is not as rigid as you may expect.

The Relative Immutability of Tuples

Tuples, like most Python collections—lists, dicts, sets, etc.—hold references to objects.¹ If the referenced items are mutable, they may change even if the tuple itself does not. In other words, the immutability of tuples really refers to the physical contents of the tuple data structure (i.e., the references it holds), and does not extend to the referenced objects.

Example 8-5 illustrates the situation in which the value of a tuple changes as result of changes to a mutable object referenced in it. What can never change in a tuple is the identity of the items it contains.

Example 8-5. t1 and t2 initially compare equal, but changing a mutable item inside tuple t1 makes it different

>>> t1 = (1, 2, [30, 40])
>>> t2 = (1, 2, [30, 40])
>>> t1 == t2
True
>>> id(t1[-1])
4302515784
>>> t1[-1].append(99)
>>> t1
(1, 2, [30, 40, 99])
>>> id(t1[-1])
4302515784
>>> t1 == t2
False

t1 is immutable, but t1[-1] is mutable.

Build a tuple t2 whose items are equal to those of t1.

Although distinct objects, t1 and t2 compare equal, as expected.

Inspect the identity of the list at t1[-1].

Modify the t1[-1] list in place.

The identity of t1[-1] has not changed, only its value.

t1 and t2 are now different.

This relative immutability of tuples is behind the riddle “A += Assignment Puzzler”. It’s also the reason why some tuples are unhashable, as we’ve seen in “What Is Hashable?”.

The distinction between equality and identity has further implications when you need to copy an object. A copy is an equal object with a different ID. But if an object contains other objects, should the copy also duplicate the inner objects, or is it OK to share them? There’s no single answer. Read on for a discussion.

Copies Are Shallow by Default

The easiest way to copy a list (or most built-in mutable collections) is to use the built-in constructor for the type itself. For example:

>>> l1 = [3, [55, 44], (7, 8, 9)]
>>> l2 = list(l1)
>>> l2
[3, [55, 44], (7, 8, 9)]
>>> l2 == l1
True
>>> l2 is l1
False

list(l1) creates a copy of l1.

The copies are equal.

But refer to two different objects.

For lists and other mutable sequences, the shortcut l2 = l1[:] also makes a copy.

However, using the constructor or [:] produces a shallow copy (i.e., the outermost container is duplicated, but the copy is filled with references to the same items held by the original container). This saves memory and causes no problems if all the items are immutable. But if there are mutable items, this may lead to unpleasant surprises.

In Example 8-6, we create a shallow copy of a list containing another list and a tuple, and then make changes to see how they affect the referenced objects.

Tip

If you have a connected computer on hand, I highly recommend watching the interactive animation for Example 8-6 at the Online Python Tutor. As I write this, direct linking to a prepared example at pythontutor.com is not working reliably, but the tool is awesome, so taking the time to copy and paste the code is worthwhile.

Example 8-6. Making a shallow copy of a list containing another list; copy and paste this code to see it animated at the Online Python Tutor

l1 = [3, [66, 55, 44], (7, 8, 9)]
l2 = list(l1)
l1.append(100)
l1[1].remove(55)
print('l1:', l1)
print('l2:', l2)
l2[1] += [33, 22]
l2[2] += (10, 11)
print('l1:', l1)
print('l2:', l2)

l2 is a shallow copy of l1. This state is depicted in Figure 8-3.

Appending 100 to l1 has no effect on l2.

Here we remove 55 from the inner list l1[1]. This affects l2 because l2[1] is bound to the same list as l1[1].

For a mutable object like the list referred by l2[1], the operator += changes the list in place. This change is visible at l1[1], which is an alias for l2[1].

+= on a tuple creates a new tuple and rebinds the variable l2[2] here. This is the same as doing l2[2] = l2[2] + (10, 11). Now the tuples in the last position of l1 and l2 are no longer the same object. See Figure 8-4.

The output of Example 8-6 is Example 8-7, and the final state of the objects is depicted in Figure 8-4.

Example 8-7. Output of Example 8-6

l1: [3, [66, 44], (7, 8, 9), 100]
l2: [3, [66, 44], (7, 8, 9)]
l1: [3, [66, 44, 33, 22], (7, 8, 9), 100]
l2: [3, [66, 44, 33, 22], (7, 8, 9, 10, 11)]

Figure 8-3. Program state immediately after the assignment l2 = list(l1) in Example 8-6. l1 and l2 refer to distinct lists, but the lists share references to the same inner list object [66, 55, 44] and tuple (7, 8, 9). (Diagram generated by the Online Python Tutor.)

Figure 8-4. Final state of l1 and l2: they still share references to the same list object, now containing [66, 44, 33, 22], but the operation l2[2] += (10, 11) created a new tuple with content (7, 8, 9, 10, 11), unrelated to the tuple (7, 8, 9) referenced by l1[2]. (Diagram generated by the Online Python Tutor.)

It should be clear now that shallow copies are easy to make, but they may or may not be what you want. How to make deep copies is our next topic.

Deep and Shallow Copies of Arbitrary Objects

Working with shallow copies is not always a problem, but sometimes you need to make deep copies (i.e., duplicates that do not share references of embedded objects). The copy module provides the deepcopy and copy functions that return deep and shallow copies of arbitrary objects.

To illustrate the use of copy() and deepcopy(), Example 8-8 defines a simple class, Bus, representing a school bus that is loaded with passengers and then picks up or drops off passengers on its route.

Example 8-8. Bus picks up and drops off passengers

class Bus:

    def __init__(self, passengers=None):
        if passengers is None:
            self.passengers = []
        else:
            self.passengers = list(passengers)

    def pick(self, name):
        self.passengers.append(name)

    def drop(self, name):
        self.passengers.remove(name)

Now in the interactive Example 8-9 we will create a bus object (bus1) and two clones—a shallow copy (bus2) and a deep copy (bus3)—to observe what happens as bus1 drops off a student.

Example 8-9. Effects of using copy versus deepcopy

>>> import copy
>>> bus1 = Bus(['Alice', 'Bill', 'Claire', 'David'])
>>> bus2 = copy.copy(bus1)
>>> bus3 = copy.deepcopy(bus1)
>>> id(bus1), id(bus2), id(bus3)
(4301498296, 4301499416, 4301499752)
>>> bus1.drop('Bill')
>>> bus2.passengers
['Alice', 'Claire', 'David']
>>> id(bus1.passengers), id(bus2.passengers), id(bus3.passengers)
(4302658568, 4302658568, 4302657800)
>>> bus3.passengers
['Alice', 'Bill', 'Claire', 'David']

Using copy and deepcopy, we create three distinct Bus instances.

After bus1 drops 'Bill', he is also missing from bus2.

Inspection of the passengers atributes shows that bus1 and bus2 share the same list object, because bus2 is a shallow copy of bus1.

bus3 is a deep copy of bus1, so its passengers attribute refers to another list.

Note that making deep copies is not a simple matter in the general case. Objects may have cyclic references that would cause a naïve algorithm to enter an infinite loop. The deepcopy function remembers the objects already copied to handle cyclic references gracefully. This is demonstrated in Example 8-10.

Example 8-10. Cyclic references: b refers to a, and then is appended to a; deepcopy still manages to copy a

>>> a = [10, 20]
>>> b = [a, 30]
>>> a.append(b)
>>> a
[10, 20, [[...], 30]]
>>> from copy import deepcopy
>>> c = deepcopy(a)
>>> c
[10, 20, [[...], 30]]

Also, a deep copy may be too deep in some cases. For example, objects may refer to external resources or singletons that should not be copied. You can control the behavior of both copy and deepcopy by implementing the __copy__() and __deepcopy__() special methods as described in the copy module documentation.

The sharing of objects through aliases also explains how parameter passing works in Python, and the problem of using mutable types as parameter defaults. These issues will be covered next.

Function Parameters as References

The only mode of parameter passing in Python is call by sharing. That is the same mode used in most OO languages, including Ruby, SmallTalk, and Java (this applies to Java reference types; primitive types use call by value). Call by sharing means that each formal parameter of the function gets a copy of each reference in the arguments. In other words, the parameters inside the function become aliases of the actual arguments.

The result of this scheme is that a function may change any mutable object passed as a parameter, but it cannot change the identity of those objects (i.e., it cannot altogether replace an object with another). Example 8-11 shows a simple function using += on one of its parameters. As we pass numbers, lists, and tuples to the function, the actual arguments passed are affected in different ways.

Example 8-11. A function may change any mutable object it receives

>>> def f(a, b):
...     a += b
...     return a
...
>>> x = 1
>>> y = 2
>>> f(x, y)
3
>>> x, y
(1, 2)
>>> a = [1, 2]
>>> b = [3, 4]
>>> f(a, b)
[1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> a, b
([1, 2, 3, 4], [3, 4])
>>> t = (10, 20)
>>> u = (30, 40)
>>> f(t, u)
(10, 20, 30, 40)
>>> t, u
((10, 20), (30, 40))

The number x is unchanged.

The list a is changed.

The tuple t is unchanged.

Another issue related to function parameters is the use of mutable values for defaults, as discussed next.

Mutable Types as Parameter Defaults: Bad Idea

Optional parameters with default values are a great feature of Python function definitions, allowing our APIs to evolve while remaining backward-compatible. However, you should avoid mutable objects as default values for parameters.

To illustrate this point, in Example 8-12, we take the Bus class from Example 8-8 and change its __init__ method to create HauntedBus. Here we tried to be clever and instead of having a default value of passengers=None, we have passengers=[], thus avoiding the if in the previous __init__. This “cleverness” gets us into trouble.

Example 8-12. A simple class to illustrate the danger of a mutable default

class HauntedBus:
    """A bus model haunted by ghost passengers"""

    def __init__(self, passengers=[]):
        self.passengers = passengers

    def pick(self, name):
        self.passengers.append(name)

    def drop(self, name):
        self.passengers.remove(name)

When the passengers argument is not passed, this parameter is bound to the default list object, which is initially empty.

This assignment makes self.passengers an alias for passengers, which is itself an alias for the default list, when no passengers argument is given.

When the methods .remove() and .append() are used with self.passengers we are actually mutating the default list, which is an attribute of the function object.

Example 8-13 shows the eerie behavior of the HauntedBus.

Example 8-13. Buses haunted by ghost passengers

>>> bus1 = HauntedBus(['Alice', 'Bill'])
>>> bus1.passengers
['Alice', 'Bill']
>>> bus1.pick('Charlie')
>>> bus1.drop('Alice')
>>> bus1.passengers
['Bill', 'Charlie']
>>> bus2 = HauntedBus()
>>> bus2.pick('Carrie')
>>> bus2.passengers
['Carrie']
>>> bus3 = HauntedBus()
>>> bus3.passengers
['Carrie']
>>> bus3.pick('Dave')
>>> bus2.passengers
['Carrie', 'Dave']
>>> bus2.passengers is bus3.passengers
True
>>> bus1.passengers
['Bill', 'Charlie']

So far, so good: no surprises with bus1.

bus2 starts empty, so the default empty list is assigned to self.passengers.

bus3 also starts empty, again the default list is assigned.

The default is no longer empty!

Now Dave, picked by bus3, appears in bus2.

The problem: bus2.passengers and bus3.passengers refer to the same list.

But bus1.passengers is a distinct list.

The problem is that HauntedBus instances that don’t get an initial passenger list end up sharing the same passenger list among themselves.

Such bugs may be subtle. As Example 8-13 demonstrates, when a HauntedBus is instantiated with passengers, it works as expected. Strange things happen only when a HauntedBus starts empty, because then self.passengers becomes an alias for the default value of the passengers parameter. The problem is that each default value is evaluated when the function is defined—i.e., usually when the module is loaded—and the default values become attributes of the function object. So if a default value is a mutable object, and you change it, the change will affect every future call of the function.

After running the lines in Example 8-13, you can inspect the HauntedBus.__init__ object and see the ghost students haunting its __defaults__ attribute:

>>> dir(HauntedBus.__init__)  # doctest: +ELLIPSIS
['__annotations__', '__call__', ..., '__defaults__', ...]
>>> HauntedBus.__init__.__defaults__
(['Carrie', 'Dave'],)

Finally, we can verify that bus2.passengers is an alias bound to the first element of the HauntedBus.__init__.__defaults__ attribute:

>>> HauntedBus.__init__.__defaults__[0] is bus2.passengers
True

The issue with mutable defaults explains why None is often used as the default value for parameters that may receive mutable values. In Example 8-8, __init__ checks whether the passengers argument is None, and assigns a new empty list to self.passengers. As explained in the following section, if passengers is not None, the correct implementation assigns a copy of it to self.passengers. Let’s now take a closer look.

Defensive Programming with Mutable Parameters

When you are coding a function that receives a mutable parameter, you should carefully consider whether the caller expects the argument passed to be changed.

For example, if your function receives a dict and needs to modify it while processing it, should this side effect be visible outside of the function or not? Actually it depends on the context. It’s really a matter of aligning the expectation of the coder of the function and that of the caller.

The last bus example in this chapter shows how a TwilightBus breaks expectations by sharing its passenger list with its clients. Before studying the implementation, see in Example 8-14 how the TwilightBus class works from the perspective of a client of the class.

Example 8-14. Passengers disappear when dropped by a TwilightBus

>>> basketball_team = ['Sue', 'Tina', 'Maya', 'Diana', 'Pat']
>>> bus = TwilightBus(basketball_team)
>>> bus.drop('Tina')
>>> bus.drop('Pat')
>>> basketball_team
['Sue', 'Maya', 'Diana']

basketball_team holds five student names.

A TwilightBus is loaded with the team.

The bus drops one student, then another.

The dropped passengers vanished from the basketball team!

TwilightBus violates the “Principle of least astonishment,” a best practice of interface design. It surely is astonishing that when the bus drops a student, her name is removed from the basketball team roster.

Example 8-15 is the implementation TwilightBus and an explanation of the problem.

Example 8-15. A simple class to show the perils of mutating received arguments

class TwilightBus:
    """A bus model that makes passengers vanish"""

    def __init__(self, passengers=None):
        if passengers is None:
            self.passengers = []
        else:
            self.passengers = passengers

    def pick(self, name):
        self.passengers.append(name)

    def drop(self, name):
        self.passengers.remove(name)

Here we are careful to create a new empty list when passengers is None.

However, this assignment makes self.passengers an alias for passengers, which is itself an alias for the actual argument passed to __init__ (i.e.,basketball_team in Example 8-14).

When the methods .remove() and .append() are used with self.passengers, we are actually mutating the original list received as argument to the constructor.

The problem here is that the bus is aliasing the list that is passed to the constructor. Instead, it should keep its own passenger list. The fix is simple: in __init__, when the passengers parameter is provided, self.passengers should be initialized with a copy of it, as we did correctly in Example 8-8 (“Deep and Shallow Copies of Arbitrary Objects”):

    def __init__(self, passengers=None):
        if passengers is None:
            self.passengers = []
        else:
            self.passengers = list(passengers)

Make a copy of the passengers list, or convert it to a list if it’s not one.

Now our internal handling of the passenger list will not affect the argument used to initialize the bus. As a bonus, this solution is more flexible: now the argument passed to the passengers parameter may be a tuple or any other iterable, like a set or even database results, because the list constructor accepts any iterable. As we create our own list to manage, we ensure that it supports the necessary .remove() and .append() operations we use in the .pick() and .drop() methods.

Tip

Unless a method is explicitly intended to mutate an object received as argument, you should think twice before aliasing the argument object by simply assigning it to an instance variable in your class. If in doubt, make a copy. Your clients will often be happier.

del and Garbage Collection

Objects are never explicitly destroyed; however, when they become unreachable they may be garbage-collected.

Data Model, chapter of The Python Language Reference

The del statement deletes names, not objects. An object may be garbage collected as result of a del command, but only if the variable deleted holds the last reference to the object, or if the object becomes unreachable.² Rebinding a variable may also cause the number of references to an object to reach zero, causing its destruction.

Warning

There is a __del__ special method, but it does not cause the disposal of the instance, and should not be called by your code. __del__ is invoked by the Python interpreter when the instance is about to be destroyed to give it a chance to release external resources. You will seldom need to implement __del__ in your own code, yet some Python beginners spend time coding it for no good reason. The proper use of __del__ is rather tricky. See the __del__ special method documentation in the “Data Model” chapter of The Python Language Reference.

In CPython, the primary algorithm for garbage collection is reference counting. Essentially, each object keeps count of how many references point to it. As soon as that refcount reaches zero, the object is immediately destroyed: CPython calls the __del__ method on the object (if defined) and then frees the memory allocated to the object. In CPython 2.0, a generational garbage collection algorithm was added to detect groups of objects involved in reference cycles—which may be unreachable even with outstanding references to them, when all the mutual references are contained within the group. Other implementations of Python have more sophisticated garbage collectors that do not rely on reference counting, which means the __del__ method may not be called immediately when there are no more references to the object. See “PyPy, Garbage Collection, and a Deadlock” by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis for discussion of improper and proper use of __del__.

To demonstrate the end of an object’s life, Example 8-16 uses weakref.finalize to register a callback function to be called when an object is destroyed.

Example 8-16. Watching the end of an object when no more references point to it

>>> import weakref
>>> s1 = {1, 2, 3}
>>> s2 = s1
>>> def bye():
...     print('Gone with the wind...')
...
>>> ender = weakref.finalize(s1, bye)
>>> ender.alive
True
>>> del s1
>>> ender.alive
True
>>> s2 = 'spam'
Gone with the wind...
>>> ender.alive
False

s1 and s2 are aliases referring to the same set, {1, 2, 3}.

This function must not be a bound method of the object about to be destroyed or otherwise hold a reference to it.

Register the bye callback on the object referred by s1.

The .alive attribute is True before the finalize object is called.

As discussed, del does not delete an object, just a reference to it.

Rebinding the last reference, s2, makes {1, 2, 3} unreachable. It is destroyed, the bye callback is invoked, and ender.alive becomes False.

The point of Example 8-16 is to make explicit that del does not delete objects, but objects may be deleted as a consequence of being unreachable after del is used.

You may be wondering why the {1, 2, 3} object was destroyed in Example 8-16. After all, the s1 reference was passed to the finalize function, which must have held on to it in order to monitor the object and invoke the callback. This works because finalize holds a weak reference to {1, 2, 3}, as explained in the next section.

Weak References

The presence of references is what keeps an object alive in memory. When the reference count of an object reaches zero, the garbage collector disposes of it. But sometimes it is useful to have a reference to an object that does not keep it around longer than necessary. A common use case is a cache.

Weak references to an object do not increase its reference count. The object that is the target of a reference is called the referent. Therefore, we say that a weak reference does not prevent the referent from being garbage collected.

Weak references are useful in caching applications because you don’t want the cached objects to be kept alive just because they are referenced by the cache.

Example 8-17 shows how a weakref.ref instance can be called to reach its referent. If the object is alive, calling the weak reference returns it, otherwise None is returned.

Tip

Example 8-17 is a console session, and the Python console automatically binds the _ variable to the result of expressions that are not None. This interfered with my intended demonstration but also highlights a practical matter: when trying to micro-manage memory we are often surprised by hidden, implicit assignments that create new references to our objects. The _ console variable is one example. Traceback objects are another common source of unexpected references.

Example 8-17. A weak reference is a callable that returns the referenced object or None if the referent is no more

>>> import weakref
>>> a_set = {0, 1}
>>> wref = weakref.ref(a_set)
>>> wref
<weakref at 0x100637598; to 'set' at 0x100636748>
>>> wref()
{0, 1}
>>> a_set = {2, 3, 4}
>>> wref()
{0, 1}
>>> wref() is None
False
>>> wref() is None
True

The wref weak reference object is created and inspected in the next line.

Invoking wref() returns the referenced object, {0, 1}. Because this is a console session, the result {0, 1} is bound to the _ variable.

a_set no longer refers to the {0, 1} set, so its reference count is decreased. But the _ variable still refers to it.

Calling wref() still returns {0, 1}.

When this expression is evaluated, {0, 1} lives, therefore wref() is not None. But _ is then bound to the resulting value, False. Now there are no more strong references to {0, 1}.

Because the {0, 1} object is now gone, this last call to wref() returns None.

The weakref module documentation makes the point that the weakref.ref class is actually a low-level interface intended for advanced uses, and that most programs are better served by the use of the weakref collections and finalize. In other words, consider using WeakKeyDictionary, WeakValueDictionary, WeakSet, and finalize (which use weak references internally) instead of creating and handling your own weakref.ref instances by hand. We just did that in Example 8-17 in the hope that showing a single weakref.ref in action could take away some of the mystery around them. But in practice, most of the time Python programs use the weakref collections.

The next subsection briefly discusses the weakref collections.

The WeakValueDictionary Skit

The class WeakValueDictionary implements a mutable mapping where the values are weak references to objects. When a referred object is garbage collected elsewhere in the program, the corresponding key is automatically removed from WeakValueDictionary. This is commonly used for caching.

Our demonstration of a WeakValueDictionary is inspired by the classic Cheese Shop skit by Monty Python, in which a customer asks for more than 40 kinds of cheese, including cheddar and mozzarella, but none are in stock.³

Example 8-18 implements a trivial class to represent each kind of cheese.

Example 8-18. Cheese has a kind attribute and a standard representation

class Cheese:

    def __init__(self, kind):
        self.kind = kind

    def __repr__(self):
        return 'Cheese(%r)' % self.kind

In Example 8-19, each cheese is loaded from a catalog to a stock implemented as a WeakValueDictionary. However, all but one disappear from the stock as soon as the catalog is deleted. Can you explain why the Parmesan cheese lasts longer than the others?⁴ The tip after the code has the answer.

Example 8-19. Customer: “Have you in fact got any cheese here at all?”

>>> import weakref
>>> stock = weakref.WeakValueDictionary()
>>> catalog = [Cheese('Red Leicester'), Cheese('Tilsit'),
...                 Cheese('Brie'), Cheese('Parmesan')]
...
>>> for cheese in catalog:
...     stock[cheese.kind] = cheese
...
>>> sorted(stock.keys())
['Brie', 'Parmesan', 'Red Leicester', 'Tilsit']
>>> del catalog
>>> sorted(stock.keys())
['Parmesan']
>>> del cheese
>>> sorted(stock.keys())
[]

stock is a WeakValueDictionary.

The stock maps the name of the cheese to a weak reference to the cheese instance in the catalog.

The stock is complete.

After the catalog is deleted, most cheeses are gone from the stock, as expected in WeakValueDictionary. Why not all, in this case?

Tip

A temporary variable may cause an object to last longer than expected by holding a reference to it. This is usually not a problem with local variables: they are destroyed when the function returns. But in Example 8-19, the for loop variable cheese is a global variable and will never go away unless explicitly deleted.

A counterpart to the WeakValueDictionary is the WeakKeyDictionary in which the keys are weak references. The weakref.WeakKeyDictionary documentation hints on possible uses:

[A WeakKeyDictionary] can be used to associate additional data with an object owned by other parts of an application without adding attributes to those objects. This can be especially useful with objects that override attribute accesses.

The weakref module also provides a WeakSet, simply described in the docs as “Set class that keeps weak references to its elements. An element will be discarded when no strong reference to it exists any more.” If you need to build a class that is aware of every one of its instances, a good solution is to create a class attribute with a WeakSet to hold the references to the instances. Otherwise, if a regular set was used, the instances would never be garbage collected, because the class itself would have strong references to them, and classes live as long as the Python process unless you deliberately delete them.

These collections, and weak references in general, are limited in the kinds of objects they can handle. The next section explains.

Limitations of Weak References

Not every Python object may be the target, or referent, of a weak reference. Basic list and dict instances may not be referents, but a plain subclass of either can solve this problem easily:

class MyList(list):
    """list subclass whose instances may be weakly referenced"""

a_list = MyList(range(10))

# a_list can be the target of a weak reference
wref_to_a_list = weakref.ref(a_list)

A set instance can be a referent, and that’s why a set was used in Example 8-17. User-defined types also pose no problem, which explains why the silly Cheese class was needed in Example 8-19. But int and tuple instances cannot be targets of weak references, even if subclasses of those types are created.

Most of these limitations are implementation details of CPython that may not apply to other Python interpreters. They are the result of internal optimizations, some of which are discussed in the following (highly optional) section.

Tricks Python Plays with Immutables

Note

You may safely skip this section. It discusses some Python implementation details that are not really important for users of Python. They are shortcuts and optimizations done by the CPython core developers, which should not bother you when using the language, and that may not apply to other Python implementations or even future versions of CPython. Nevertheless, while experimenting with aliases and copies you may stumble upon these tricks, so I felt they were worth mentioning.

I was surprised to learn that, for a tuple t, t[:] does not make a copy, but returns a reference to the same object. You also get a reference to the same tuple if you write tuple(t).⁵ Example 8-20 proves it.

Example 8-20. A tuple built from another is actually the same exact tuple

>>> t1 = (1, 2, 3)
>>> t2 = tuple(t1)
>>> t2 is t1
True
>>> t3 = t1[:]
>>> t3 is t1
True

t1 and t2 are bound to the same object.

And so is t3.

The same behavior can be observed with instances of str, bytes, and frozenset. Note that a frozenset is not a sequence, so fs[:] does not work if fs is a frozenset. But fs.copy() has the same effect: it cheats and returns a reference to the same object, and not a copy at all, as Example 8-21 shows.⁶

Example 8-21. String literals may create shared objects

>>> t1 = (1, 2, 3)
>>> t3 = (1, 2, 3)
>>> t3 is t1
False
>>> s1 = 'ABC'
>>> s2 = 'ABC'
>>> s2 is s1
True

Creating a new tuple from scratch.

t1 and t3 are equal, but not the same object.

Creating a second str from scratch.

Surprise: a and b refer to the same str!

The sharing of string literals is an optimization technique called interning. CPython uses the same technique with small integers to avoid unnecessary duplication of “popular” numbers like 0, –1, and 42. Note that CPython does not intern all strings or integers, and the criteria it uses to do so is an undocumented implementation detail.

Warning

Never depend on str or int interning! Always use == and not is to compare them for equality. Interning is a feature for internal use of the Python interpreter.

The tricks discussed in this section, including the behavior of frozenset.copy(), are “white lies”; they save memory and make the interpreter faster. Do not worry about them, they should not give you any trouble because they only apply to immutable types. Probably the best use of these bits of trivia is to win bets with fellow Pythonistas.

Chapter Summary

Every Python object has an identity, a type, and a value. Only the value of an object changes over time.⁷

If two variables refer to immutable objects that have equal values (a == b is True), in practice it rarely matters if they refer to copies or are aliases referring to the same object because the value of an immutable object does not change, with one exception. The exception is immutable collections such as tuples and frozensets: if an immutable collection holds references to mutable items, then its value may actually change when the value of a mutable item changes. In practice, this scenario is not so common. What never changes in an immutable collection are the identities of the objects within.

The fact that variables hold references has many practical consequences in Python programming:

Simple assignment does not create copies.

Augmented assignment with += or *= creates new objects if the lefthand variable is bound to an immutable object, but may modify a mutable object in place.

Assigning a new value to an existing variable does not change the object previously bound to it. This is called a rebinding: the variable is now bound to a different object. If that variable was the last reference to the previous object, that object will be garbage collected.

Function parameters are passed as aliases, which means the function may change any mutable object received as an argument. There is no way to prevent this, except making local copies or using immutable objects (e.g., passing a tuple instead of a list).

Using mutable objects as default values for function parameters is dangerous because if the parameters are changed in place, then the default is changed, affecting every future call that relies on the default.

In CPython, objects are discarded as soon as the number of references to them reaches zero. They may also be discarded if they form groups with cyclic references but no outside references. In some situations, it may be useful to hold a reference to an object that will not—by itself—keep an object alive. One example is a class that wants to keep track of all its current instances. This can be done with weak references, a low-level mechanism underlying the more useful collections WeakValueDictionary, WeakKeyDictionary, WeakSet, and the finalize function from the weakref module.

Further Reading

The “Data Model” chapter of The Python Language Reference starts with a clear explanation of object identities and values.

Wesley Chun, author of the Core Python series of books, made a great presentation about many of the topics covered in this chapter during OSCON 2013. You can download the slides from the “Python 103: Memory Model & Best Practices” talk page. There is also a YouTube video of a longer presentation Wesley gave at EuroPython 2011, covering not only the theme of this chapter but also the use of special methods.

Doug Hellmann wrote a long series of excellent blog posts titled Python Module of the Week, which became a book, The Python Standard Library by Example. His posts “copy – Duplicate Objects” and “weakref – Garbage-Collectable References to Objects” cover some of the topics we just discussed.

More information on the CPython generational garbage collector can be found in the gc module documentation, which starts with the sentence “This module provides an interface to the optional garbage collector.” The “optional” qualifier here may be surprising, but the “Data Model” chapter also states:

An implementation is allowed to postpone garbage collection or omit it altogether—it is a matter of implementation quality how garbage collection is implemented, as long as no objects are collected that are still reachable.

Fredrik Lundh—creator of key libraries like ElementTree, Tkinter, and the PIL image library—has a short post about the Python garbage collector titled “How Does Python Manage Memory?” He emphasizes that the garbage collector is an implementation feature that behaves differently across Python interpreters. For example, Jython uses the Java garbage collector.

The CPython 3.4 garbage collector improved handling of objects with a __del__ method, as described in PEP 442 — Safe object finalization.

Wikipedia has an article about string interning, mentioning the use of this technique in several languages, including Python.

Soapbox

Equal Treatment to All Objects

I learned Java before I discovered Python. The == operator in Java never felt right for me. It is much more common for programmers to care about equality than identity, but for objects (not primitive types) the Java == compares references, and not object values. Even for something as basic as comparing strings, Java forces you to use the .equals method. Even then, there is another catch: if you write a.equals(b) and a is null, you get a null pointer exception. The Java designers felt the need to overload + for strings, so why not go ahead and overload == as well?

Python gets this right. The == operator compares object values and is compares references. And because Python has operator overloading, == works sensibly with all objects in the standard library, including None, which is a proper object, unlike Java’s null.

And of course, you can define __eq__ in your own classes to decide what == means for your instances. If you don’t override __eq__, the method inherited from object compares object IDs, so the fallback is that every instance of a user-defined class is considered different.

These are some of the things that made me switch from Java to Python as soon as I finished reading the Python Tutorial one afternoon in September 1998.

Mutability

This chapter would be redundant if all Python objects were immutable. When you are dealing with unchanging objects, it makes no difference whether variables hold the actual objects or references to shared objects. If a == b is true, and neither object can change, they might as well be the same. That’s why string interning is safe. Object identity becomes important only when objects are mutable.

In “pure” functional programming, all data is immutable: appending to a collection actually creates a new collection. Python, however, is not a functional language, much less a pure one. Instances of user-defined classes are mutable by default in Python—as in most object-oriented languages. When creating your own objects, you have to be extra careful to make them immutable, if that is a requirement. Every attribute of the object must also be immutable, otherwise you end up with something like the tuple: immutable as far as object IDs go, but the value of a tuple may change if it holds a mutable object.

Mutable objects are also the main reason why programming with threads is so hard to get right: threads mutating objects without proper synchronization produce corrupted data. Excessive synchronization, on the other hand, causes deadlocks.

Object Destruction and Garbage Collection

There is no mechanism in Python to directly destroy an object, and this omission is actually a great feature: if you could destroy an object at any time, what would happen to existing strong references pointing to it?

Garbage collection in CPython is done primarily by reference counting, which is easy to implement, but is prone to memory leaking when there are reference cycles, so with version 2.0 (October 2000) a generational garbage collector was implemented, and it is able to dispose of unreachable objects kept alive by reference cycles.

But the reference counting is still there as a baseline, and it causes the immediate disposal of objects with zero references. This means that, in CPython—at least for now—it’s safe to write this:

open('test.txt', 'wt', encoding='utf-8').write('1, 2, 3')

That code is safe because the reference count of the file object will be zero after the write method returns, and Python will immediately close the file before destroying the object representing it in memory. However, the same line is not safe in Jython or IronPython that use the garbage collector of their host runtimes (the Java VM and the .NET CLR), which are more sophisticated but do not rely on reference counting and may take longer to destroy the object and close the file. In all cases, including CPython, the best practice is to explicitly close the file, and the most reliable way of doing it is using the with statement, which guarantees that the file will be closed even if exceptions are raised while it is open. Using with, the previous snippet becomes:

with open('test.txt', 'wt', encoding='utf-8') as fp:
    fp.write('1, 2, 3')

If you are into the subject of garbage collectors, you may want to read Thomas Perl’s paper “Python Garbage Collector Implementations: CPython, PyPy and GaS”, from which I learned the bit about the safety of the open().write() in CPython.

Parameter Passing: Call by Sharing

A popular way of explaining how parameter passing works in Python is the phrase: “Parameters are passed by value, but the values are references.” This not wrong, but causes confusion because the most common parameter passing modes in older languages are call by value (the function gets a copy of the argument) and call by reference (the function gets a pointer to the argument). In Python, the function gets a copy of the arguments, but the arguments are always references. So the value of the referenced objects may be changed, if they are mutable, but their identity cannot. Also, because the function gets a copy of the reference in an argument, rebinding it has no effect outside of the function. I adopted the term call by sharing after reading up on the subject in Programming Language Pragmatics, Third Edition by Michael L. Scott (Morgan Kaufmann), particularly “8.3.1: Parameter Modes.”

The Full Quote of Alice and the Knights’s Song

I love this passage, but it was too long as a chapter opener. So here is the complete dialog about the Knight’s song, its name, and how the song and its name are called:

‘You are sad,’ the Knight said in an anxious tone: ‘let me sing you a song to comfort you.’

‘Is it very long?’ Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.

‘It’s long,’ said the Knight, ‘but very, VERY beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it—either it brings the TEARS into their eyes, or else—’

‘Or else what?’ said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.

‘Or else it doesn’t, you know. The name of the song is called “HADDOCKS’ EYES”.’

‘Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?’ Alice said, trying to feel interested.

‘No, you don’t understand,’ the Knight said, looking a little vexed. ‘That’s what the name is CALLED. The name really IS “THE AGED AGED MAN”.’

‘Then I ought to have said “That’s what the SONG is called”?’ Alice corrected herself.

‘No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The SONG is called “WAYS AND MEANS”: but that’s only what it’s CALLED, you know!’

‘Well, what IS the song, then?’ said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

‘I was coming to that,’ the Knight said. ‘The song really IS “A-SITTING ON A GATE”: and the tune’s my own invention.’

Lewis Carroll, Chapter VIII, “It’s My Own Invention,” Through the Looking-Glass

¹ On the other hand, single-type sequences like str, bytes, and array.array are flat: they don’t contain references but physically hold their data—characters, bytes, and numbers—in contiguous memory.

² If two objects refer to each other, as in Example 8-10, they may be destroyed if the garbage collector determines that they are otherwise unreachable because their only references are their mutual references.

³ cheeseshop.python.org is also an alias for PyPI—the Python Package Index software repository—which started its life quite empty. At the time of this writing, the Python Cheese Shop has 41,426 packages. Not bad, but still far from the more than 131,000 modules available in CPAN—the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network—the envy of all dynamic language communities.

⁴ Parmesan cheese is aged at least a year at the factory, so it is more durable than fresh cheese, but this is not the answer we are looking for.

⁵ This is clearly documented. Type help(tuple) in the Python console to read: “If the argument is a tuple, the return value is the same object.” I thought I knew everything about tuples before writing this book.

⁶ The white lie of having the copy method not copying anything can be explained by interface compatibility: it makes frozenset more compatible with set. Anyway, it makes no difference to the end user whether two identical immutable objects are the same or are copies.

⁷ Actually the type of an object may be changed by merely assigning a different class to its __class__ attribute, but that is pure evil and I regret writing this footnote.

Chapter 9. A Pythonic Object

Never, ever use two leading underscores. This is annoyingly private.¹

Ian Bicking, Creator of pip, virtualenv, Paste and many other projects

Thanks to the Python data model, your user-defined types can behave as naturally as the built-in types. And this can be accomplished without inheritance, in the spirit of duck typing: you just implement the methods needed for your objects to behave as expected.

In previous chapters, we presented the structure and behavior of many built-in objects. We will now build user-defined classes that behave as real Python objects.

This chapter starts where Chapter 1 ended, by showing how to implement several special methods that are commonly seen in Python objects of many different types.

In this chapter, we will see how to:

Support the built-in functions that produce alternative object representations (e.g., repr(), bytes(), etc).

Implement an alternative constructor as a class method.

Extend the format mini-language used by the format() built-in and the str.format() method.

Provide read-only access to attributes.

Make an object hashable for use in sets and as dict keys.

Save memory with the use of __slots__.

We’ll do all that as we develop a simple two-dimensional Euclidean vector type.

The evolution of the example will be paused to discuss two conceptual topics:

How and when to use the @classmethod and @staticmethod decorators.

Private and protected attributes in Python: usage, conventions, and limitations.

Let’s get started with the object representation methods.

Object Representations

Every object-oriented language has at least one standard way of getting a string representation from any object. Python has two:

repr()

Return a string representing the object as the developer wants to see it.

str()

Return a string representing the object as the user wants to see it.

As you know, we implement the special methods __repr__ and __str__ to support repr() and str().

There are two additional special methods to support alternative representations of objects: __bytes__ and __format__. The __bytes__ method is analogous to __str__: it’s called by bytes() to get the object represented as a byte sequence. Regarding __format__, both the built-in function format() and the str.format() method call it to get string displays of objects using special formatting codes. We’ll cover __bytes__ in the next example, and __format__ after that.

Warning

If you’re coming from Python 2, remember that in Python 3 __repr__, __str__, and __format__ must always return Unicode strings (type str). Only __bytes__ is supposed to return a byte sequence (type bytes).

Vector Class Redux

In order to demonstrate the many methods used to generate object representations, we’ll use a Vector2d class similar to the one we saw in Chapter 1. We will build on it in this and future sections. Example 9-1 illustrates the basic behavior we expect from a Vector2d instance.

Example 9-1. Vector2d instances have several representations

    >>> v1 = Vector2d(3, 4)
    >>> print(v1.x, v1.y)
    3.0 4.0
    >>> x, y = v1
    >>> x, y
    (3.0, 4.0)
    >>> v1
    Vector2d(3.0, 4.0)
    >>> v1_clone = eval(repr(v1))
    >>> v1 == v1_clone
    True
    >>> print(v1)
    (3.0, 4.0)
    >>> octets = bytes(v1)
    >>> octets
    b'd\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x08@\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x10@'
    >>> abs(v1)
    5.0
    >>> bool(v1), bool(Vector2d(0, 0))
    (True, False)

The components of a Vector2d can be accessed directly as attributes (no getter method calls).

A Vector2d can be unpacked to a tuple of variables.

The repr of a Vector2d emulates the source code for constructing the instance.

Using eval here shows that the repr of a Vector2d is a faithful representation of its constructor call.²

Vector2d supports comparison with ==; this is useful for testing.

print calls str, which for Vector2d produces an ordered pair display.

bytes uses the __bytes__ method to produce a binary representation.

abs uses the __abs__ method to return the magnitude of the Vector2d.

bool uses the __bool__ method to return False for a Vector2d of zero magnitude or True otherwise.

Vector2d from Example 9-1 is implemented in vector2d_v0.py (Example 9-2). The code is based on Example 1-2, but the infix operators will be implemented in Chapter 13—except for == (which is useful for testing). At this point, Vector2d uses several special methods to provide operations that a Pythonista expects in a well-designed object.

Example 9-2. vector2d_v0.py: methods so far are all special methods

from array import array
import math

class Vector2d:
    typecode = 'd'

    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self.x = float(x)
        self.y = float(y)

    def __iter__(self):
        return (i for i in (self.x, self.y))

    def __repr__(self):
        class_name = type(self).__name__
        return '{}({!r}, {!r})'.format(class_name, *self)

    def __str__(self):
        return str(tuple(self))

    def __bytes__(self):
        return (bytes([ord(self.typecode)]) +
                bytes(array(self.typecode, self)))

    def __eq__(self, other):
        return tuple(self) == tuple(other)

    def __abs__(self):
        return math.hypot(self.x, self.y)

    def __bool__(self):
        return bool(abs(self))

typecode is a class attribute we’ll use when converting Vector2d instances to/from bytes.

Converting x and y to float in __init__ catches errors early, which is helpful in case Vector2d is called with unsuitable arguments.

__iter__ makes a Vector2d iterable; this is what makes unpacking work (e.g, x, y = my_vector). We implement it simply by using a generator expression to yield the components one after the other.³

__repr__ builds a string by interpolating the components with {!r} to get their repr; because Vector2d is iterable, *self feeds the x and y components to format.

From an iterable Vector2d, it’s easy to build a tuple for display as an ordered pair.

To generate bytes, we convert the typecode to bytes and concatenate…

…bytes converted from an array built by iterating over the instance.

To quickly compare all components, build tuples out of the operands. This works for operands that are instances of Vector2d, but has issues. See the following warning.

The magnitude is the length of the hypotenuse of the triangle formed by the x and y components.

__bool__ uses abs(self) to compute the magnitude, then converts it to bool, so 0.0 becomes False, nonzero is True.

Warning

Method __eq__ in Example 9-2 works for Vector2d operands but also returns True when comparing Vector2d instances to other iterables holding the same numeric values (e.g., Vector(3, 4) == [3, 4]). This may be considered a feature or a bug. Further discussion needs to wait until Chapter 13, when we cover operator overloading.

We have a fairly complete set of basic methods, but one obvious operation is missing: rebuilding a Vector2d from the binary representation produced by bytes().

An Alternative Constructor

Because we can export a Vector2d as bytes, naturally we need a method that imports a Vector2d from a binary sequence. Looking at the standard library for inspiration, we find that array.array has a class method named .frombytes that suits our purpose—we saw it in “Arrays”. We adopt its name and use its functionality in a class method for Vector2d in vector2d_v1.py (Example 9-3).

Example 9-3. Part of vector2d_v1.py: this snippet shows only the frombytes class method, added to the Vector2d definition in vector2d_v0.py (Example 9-2)

    @classmethod
    def frombytes(cls, octets):
        typecode = chr(octets[0])
        memv = memoryview(octets[1:]).cast(typecode)
        return cls(*memv)

Class method is modified by the classmethod decorator.

No self argument; instead, the class itself is passed as cls.

Read the typecode from the first byte.

Create a memoryview from the octets binary sequence and use the typecode to cast it.⁴

Unpack the memoryview resulting from the cast into the pair of arguments needed for the constructor.

Because we just used a classmethod decorator, and it is very Python-specific, let’s have a word about it.

classmethod Versus staticmethod

The classmethod decorator is not mentioned in the Python tutorial, and neither is staticmethod. Anyone who has learned OO in Java may wonder why Python has both of these decorators and not just one of them.

Let’s start with classmethod. Example 9-3 shows its use: to define a method that operates on the class and not on instances. classmethod changes the way the method is called, so it receives the class itself as the first argument, instead of an instance. Its most common use is for alternative constructors, like frombytes in Example 9-3. Note how the last line of frombytes actually uses the cls argument by invoking it to build a new instance: cls(*memv). By convention, the first parameter of a class method should be named cls (but Python doesn’t care how it’s named).

In contrast, the staticmethod decorator changes a method so that it receives no special first argument. In essence, a static method is just like a plain function that happens to live in a class body, instead of being defined at the module level. Example 9-4 contrasts the operation of classmethod and staticmethod.

Example 9-4. Comparing behaviors of classmethod and staticmethod

>>> class Demo:
...     @classmethod
...     def klassmeth(*args):
...         return args
...     @staticmethod
...     def statmeth(*args):
...         return args
...
>>> Demo.klassmeth()
(<class '__main__.Demo'>,)
>>> Demo.klassmeth('spam')
(<class '__main__.Demo'>, 'spam')
>>> Demo.statmeth()
()
>>> Demo.statmeth('spam')
('spam',)

klassmeth just returns all positional arguments.

statmeth does the same.

No matter how you invoke it, Demo.klassmeth receives the Demo class as the first argument.

Demo.statmeth behaves just like a plain old function.

Note

The classmethod decorator is clearly useful, but I’ve never seen a compelling use case for staticmethod. If you want to define a function that does not interact with the class, just define it in the module. Maybe the function is closely related even if it never touches the class, so you want to them nearby in the code. Even so, defining the function right before or after the class in the same module is close enough for all practical purposes.⁵

Now that we’ve seen what classmethod is good for (and that staticmethod is not very useful), let’s go back to the issue of object representation and see how to support formatted output.

Formatted Displays

The format() built-in function and the str.format() method delegate the actual formatting to each type by calling their .__format__(format_spec) method. The format_spec is a formatting specifier, which is either:

The second argument in format(my_obj, format_spec), or

Whatever appears after the colon in a replacement field delimited with {} inside a format string used with str.format()

For example:

>>> brl = 1/2.43  # BRL to USD currency conversion rate
>>> brl
0.4115226337448559
>>> format(brl, '0.4f')
'0.4115'
>>> '1 BRL = {rate:0.2f} USD'.format(rate=brl)
'1 BRL = 0.41 USD'

Formatting specifier is '0.4f'.

Formatting specifier is '0.2f'. The 'rate' substring in the replacement field is called the field name. It’s unrelated to the formatting specifier, but determines which argument of .format() goes into that replacement field.

The second callout makes an important point: a format string such as '{0.mass:5.3e}' actually uses two separate notations. The '0.mass' to the left of the colon is the field_name part of the replacement field syntax; the '5.3e' after the colon is the formatting specifier. The notation used in the formatting specifier is called the Format Specification Mini-Language.

Tip

If format() and str.format() are new to you, classroom experience has shown that it’s best to study the format() function first, which uses just the Format Specification Mini-Language. After you get the gist of that, read Format String Syntax to learn about the {:} replacement field notation, used in the str.format() method (including the !s, !r, and !a conversion flags).

A few built-in types have their own presentation codes in the Format Specification Mini-Language. For example—among several other codes—the int type supports b and x for base 2 and base 16 output, respectively, while float implements f for a fixed-point display and % for a percentage display:

>>> format(42, 'b')
'101010'
>>> format(2/3, '.1%')
'66.7%'

The Format Specification Mini-Language is extensible because each class gets to interpret the format_spec argument as it likes. For instance, the classes in the datetime module use the same format codes in the strftime() functions and in their __format__ methods. Here are a couple examples using the format() built-in and the str.format() method:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> now = datetime.now()
>>> format(now, '%H:%M:%S')
'18:49:05'
>>> "It's now {:%I:%M %p}".format(now)
"It's now 06:49 PM"

If a class has no __format__, the method inherited from object returns str(my_object). Because Vector2d has a __str__, this works:

>>> v1 = Vector2d(3, 4)
>>> format(v1)
'(3.0, 4.0)'

However, if you pass a format specifier, object.__format__ raises TypeError:

>>> format(v1, '.3f')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
TypeError: non-empty format string passed to object.__format__

We will fix that by implementing our own format mini-language. The first step will be to assume the format specifier provided by the user is intended to format each float component of the vector. This is the result we want:

>>> v1 = Vector2d(3, 4)
>>> format(v1)
'(3.0, 4.0)'
>>> format(v1, '.2f')
'(3.00, 4.00)'
>>> format(v1, '.3e')
'(3.000e+00, 4.000e+00)'

Example 9-5 implements __format__ to produce the displays just shown.

Example 9-5. Vector2d.format method, take #1

    # inside the Vector2d class

    def __format__(self, fmt_spec=''):
        components = (format(c, fmt_spec) for c in self)
        return '({}, {})'.format(*components)

Use the format built-in to apply the fmt_spec to each vector component, building an iterable of formatted strings.

Plug the formatted strings in the formula '(x, y)'.

Now let’s add a custom formatting code to our mini-language: if the format specifier ends with a 'p', we’ll display the vector in polar coordinates: <r, θ>, where r is the magnitude and θ (theta) is the angle in radians. The rest of the format specifier (whatever comes before the 'p') will be used as before.

Tip

When choosing the letter for the custom format code I avoided overlapping with codes used by other types. In Format Specification Mini-Language we see that integers use the codes 'bcdoxXn', floats use 'eEfFgGn%', and strings use 's'. So I picked 'p' for polar coordinates. Because each class interprets these codes independently, reusing a code letter in a custom format for a new type is not an error, but may be confusing to users.

To generate polar coordinates we already have the __abs__ method for the magnitude, and we’ll code a simple angle method using the math.atan2() function to get the angle. This is the code:

    # inside the Vector2d class

    def angle(self):
        return math.atan2(self.y, self.x)

With that, we can enhance our __format__ to produce polar coordinates. See Example 9-6.

Example 9-6. Vector2d.format method, take #2, now with polar coordinates

    def __format__(self, fmt_spec=''):
        if fmt_spec.endswith('p'):
            fmt_spec = fmt_spec[:-1]
            coords = (abs(self), self.angle())
            outer_fmt = '<{}, {}>'
        else:
            coords = self
            outer_fmt = '({}, {})'
        components = (format(c, fmt_spec) for c in coords)
        return outer_fmt.format(*components)

Format ends with 'p': use polar coordinates.

Remove 'p' suffix from fmt_spec.

Build tuple of polar coordinates: (magnitude, angle).

Configure outer format with angle brackets.

Otherwise, use x, y components of self for rectangular coordinates.

Configure outer format with parentheses.

Generate iterable with components as formatted strings.

Plug formatted strings into outer format.

With Example 9-6, we get results similar to these:

>>> format(Vector2d(1, 1), 'p')
'<1.4142135623730951, 0.7853981633974483>'
>>> format(Vector2d(1, 1), '.3ep')
'<1.414e+00, 7.854e-01>'
>>> format(Vector2d(1, 1), '0.5fp')
'<1.41421, 0.78540>'

As this section shows, it’s not hard to extend the format specification mini-language to support user-defined types.

Now let’s move to a subject that’s not just about appearances: we will make our Vector2d hashable, so we can build sets of vectors, or use them as dict keys. But before we can do that, we must make vectors immutable. We’ll do what it takes next.

A Hashable Vector2d

As defined, so far our Vector2d instances are unhashable, so we can’t put them in a set:

>>> v1 = Vector2d(3, 4)
>>> hash(v1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
TypeError: unhashable type: 'Vector2d'
>>> set([v1])
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
TypeError: unhashable type: 'Vector2d'

To make a Vector2d hashable, we must implement __hash__ (__eq__ is also required, and we already have it). We also need to make vector instances immutable, as we’ve seen in “What Is Hashable?”.

Right now, anyone can do v1.x = 7 and there is nothing in the code to suggest that changing a Vector2d is forbidden. This is the behavior we want:

>>> v1.x, v1.y
(3.0, 4.0)
>>> v1.x = 7
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
AttributeError: can't set attribute

We’ll do that by making the x and y components read-only properties in Example 9-7.

Example 9-7. vector2d_v3.py: only the changes needed to make Vector2d immutable are shown here; see full listing in Example 9-9

class Vector2d:
    typecode = 'd'

    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self.__x = float(x)
        self.__y = float(y)

    @property
    def x(self):
        return self.__x

    @property
    def y(self):
        return self.__y

    def __iter__(self):
        return (i for i in (self.x, self.y))

    # remaining methods follow (omitted in book listing)

Use exactly two leading underscores (with zero or one trailing underscore) to make an attribute private.⁶

The @property decorator marks the getter method of a property.

The getter method is named after the public property it exposes: x.

Just return self.__x.

Repeat same formula for y property.

Every method that just reads the x, y components can stay as they were, reading the public properties via self.x and self.y instead of the private attribute, so this listing omits the rest of the code for the class.

Note

Vector.x and Vector.y are examples of read-only properties. Read/write properties will be covered in Chapter 19, where we dive deeper into the @property.

Now that our vectors are reasonably immutable, we can implement the __hash__ method. It should return an int and ideally take into account the hashes of the object attributes that are also used in the __eq__ method, because objects that compare equal should have the same hash. The __hash__ special method documentation suggests using the bitwise XOR operator (^) to mix the hashes of the components, so that’s what we do. The code for our Vector2d.__hash__ method is really simple, as shown in Example 9-8.

Example 9-8. vector2d_v3.py: implementation of hash

    # inside class Vector2d:

    def __hash__(self):
        return hash(self.x) ^ hash(self.y)

With the addition of the __hash__ method, we now have hashable vectors:

>>> v1 = Vector2d(3, 4)
>>> v2 = Vector2d(3.1, 4.2)
>>> hash(v1), hash(v2)
(7, 384307168202284039)
>>> set([v1, v2])
{Vector2d(3.1, 4.2), Vector2d(3.0, 4.0)}

Tip

It’s not strictly necessary to implement properties or otherwise protect the instance attributes to create a hashable type. Implementing __hash__ and __eq__ correctly is all it takes. But the hash value of an instance is never supposed to change, so this provides an excellent opportunity to talk about read-only properties.

If you are creating a type that has a sensible scalar numeric value, you may also implement the __int__ and __float__ methods, invoked by the int() and float() constructors—which are used for type coercion in some contexts. There’s also a __complex__ method to support the complex() built-in constructor. Perhaps Vector2d should provide __complex__, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for you.

We have been working on Vector2d for a while, showing just snippets, so Example 9-9 is a consolidated, full listing of vector2d_v3.py, including all the doctests I used when developing it.

Example 9-9. vector2d_v3.py: the full monty

"""
A two-dimensional vector class

    >>> v1 = Vector2d(3, 4)
    >>> print(v1.x, v1.y)
    3.0 4.0
    >>> x, y = v1
    >>> x, y
    (3.0, 4.0)
    >>> v1
    Vector2d(3.0, 4.0)
    >>> v1_clone = eval(repr(v1))
    >>> v1 == v1_clone
    True
    >>> print(v1)
    (3.0, 4.0)
    >>> octets = bytes(v1)
    >>> octets
    b'd\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x08@\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x10@'
    >>> abs(v1)
    5.0
    >>> bool(v1), bool(Vector2d(0, 0))
    (True, False)

Test of ``.frombytes()`` class method:

    >>> v1_clone = Vector2d.frombytes(bytes(v1))
    >>> v1_clone
    Vector2d(3.0, 4.0)
    >>> v1 == v1_clone
    True

Tests of ``format()`` with Cartesian coordinates:

    >>> format(v1)
    '(3.0, 4.0)'
    >>> format(v1, '.2f')
    '(3.00, 4.00)'
    >>> format(v1, '.3e')
    '(3.000e+00, 4.000e+00)'

Tests of the ``angle`` method::

    >>> Vector2d(0, 0).angle()
    0.0
    >>> Vector2d(1, 0).angle()
    0.0
    >>> epsilon = 10**-8
    >>> abs(Vector2d(0, 1).angle() - math.pi/2) < epsilon
    True
    >>> abs(Vector2d(1, 1).angle() - math.pi/4) < epsilon
    True

Tests of ``format()`` with polar coordinates:

    >>> format(Vector2d(1, 1), 'p')  # doctest:+ELLIPSIS
    '<1.414213..., 0.785398...>'
    >>> format(Vector2d(1, 1), '.3ep')
    '<1.414e+00, 7.854e-01>'
    >>> format(Vector2d(1, 1), '0.5fp')
    '<1.41421, 0.78540>'

Tests of `x` and `y` read-only properties:

    >>> v1.x, v1.y
    (3.0, 4.0)
    >>> v1.x = 123
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      ...
    AttributeError: can't set attribute

Tests of hashing:

    >>> v1 = Vector2d(3, 4)
    >>> v2 = Vector2d(3.1, 4.2)
    >>> hash(v1), hash(v2)
    (7, 384307168202284039)
    >>> len(set([v1, v2]))
    2

"""

from array import array
import math

class Vector2d:
    typecode = 'd'

    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self.__x = float(x)
        self.__y = float(y)

    @property
    def x(self):
        return self.__x

    @property
    def y(self):
        return self.__y

    def __iter__(self):
        return (i for i in (self.x, self.y))

    def __repr__(self):
        class_name = type(self).__name__
        return '{}({!r}, {!r})'.format(class_name, *self)

    def __str__(self):
        return str(tuple(self))

    def __bytes__(self):
        return (bytes([ord(self.typecode)]) +
                bytes(array(self.typecode, self)))

    def __eq__(self, other):
        return tuple(self) == tuple(other)

    def __hash__(self):
        return hash(self.x) ^ hash(self.y)

    def __abs__(self):
        return math.hypot(self.x, self.y)

    def __bool__(self):
        return bool(abs(self))

    def angle(self):
        return math.atan2(self.y, self.x)

    def __format__(self, fmt_spec=''):
        if fmt_spec.endswith('p'):
            fmt_spec = fmt_spec[:-1]
            coords = (abs(self), self.angle())
            outer_fmt = '<{}, {}>'
        else:
            coords = self
            outer_fmt = '({}, {})'
        components = (format(c, fmt_spec) for c in coords)
        return outer_fmt.format(*components)

    @classmethod
    def frombytes(cls, octets):
        typecode = chr(octets[0])
        memv = memoryview(octets[1:]).cast(typecode)
        return cls(*memv)

To recap, in this and the previous sections, we saw some essential special methods that you may want to implement to have a full-fledged object. Of course, it is a bad idea to implement all of these methods if your application has no real use for them. Customers don’t care if your objects are “Pythonic” or not.

As coded in Example 9-9, Vector2d is a didactic example with a laundry list of special methods related to object representation, not a template for every user-defined class.

In the next section, we’ll take a break from Vector2d to discuss the design and drawbacks of the private attribute mechanism in Python—the double-underscore prefix in self.__x.

Private and “Protected” Attributes in Python

In Python, there is no way to create private variables like there is with the private modifier in Java. What we have in Python is a simple mechanism to prevent accidental overwriting of a “private” attribute in a subclass.

Consider this scenario: someone wrote a class named Dog that uses a mood instance attribute internally, without exposing it. You need to subclass Dog as Beagle. If you create your own mood instance attribute without being aware of the name clash, you will clobber the mood attribute used by the methods inherited from Dog. This would be a pain to debug.

To prevent this, if you name an instance attribute in the form __mood (two leading underscores and zero or at most one trailing underscore), Python stores the name in the instance __dict__ prefixed with a leading underscore and the class name, so in the Dog class, __mood becomes _Dog__mood, and in Beagle it’s _Beagle__mood. This language feature goes by the lovely name of name mangling.

Example 9-10 shows the result in the Vector2d class from Example 9-7.

Example 9-10. Private attribute names are “mangled” by prefixing the _ and the class name

>>> v1 = Vector2d(3, 4)
>>> v1.__dict__
{'_Vector2d__y': 4.0, '_Vector2d__x': 3.0}
>>> v1._Vector2d__x
3.0

Name mangling is about safety, not security: it’s designed to prevent accidental access and not intentional wrongdoing (Figure 9-1 illustrates another safety device).

Anyone who knows how private names are mangled can read the private attribute directly, as the last line of Example 9-10 shows—that’s actually useful for debugging and serialization. They can also directly assign a value to a private component of a Vector2d by simply writing v1._Vector__x = 7. But if you are doing that in production code, you can’t complain if something blows up.

Figure 9-1. A cover on a switch is a safety device, not a security one: it prevents accidental activation, not malicious use

The name mangling functionality is not loved by all Pythonistas, and neither is the skewed look of names written as self.__x. Some prefer to avoid this syntax and use just one underscore prefix to “protect” attributes by convention (e.g., self._x). Critics of the automatic double-underscore mangling suggest that concerns about accidental attribute clobbering should be addressed by naming conventions. This is the full quote from the prolific Ian Bicking, cited at the beginning of this chapter:

Never, ever use two leading underscores. This is annoyingly private. If name clashes are a concern, use explicit name mangling instead (e.g., _MyThing_blahblah). This is essentially the same thing as double-underscore, only it’s transparent where double underscore obscures.⁷

The single underscore prefix has no special meaning to the Python interpreter when used in attribute names, but it’s a very strong convention among Python programmers that you should not access such attributes from outside the class.⁸ It’s easy to respect the privacy of an object that marks its attributes with a single _, just as it’s easy respect the convention that variables in ALL_CAPS should be treated as constants.

Attributes with a single _ prefix are called “protected” in some corners of the Python documentation.⁹ The practice of “protecting” attributes by convention with the form self._x is widespread, but calling that a “protected” attribute is not so common. Some even call that a “private” attribute.

To conclude: the Vector2d components are “private” and our Vector2d instances are “immutable”—with scare quotes—because there is no way to make them really private and immutable.¹⁰

We’ll now come back to our Vector2d class. In this final section, we cover a special attribute (not a method) that affects the internal storage of an object, with potentially huge impact on the use of memory but little effect on its public interface: __slots__.

Saving Space with the __slots__ Class Attribute

By default, Python stores instance attributes in a per-instance dict named __dict__. As we saw in “Practical Consequences of How dict Works”, dictionaries have a significant memory overhead because of the underlying hash table used to provide fast access. If you are dealing with millions of instances with few attributes, the __slots__ class attribute can save a lot of memory, by letting the interpreter store the instance attributes in a tuple instead of a dict.

Warning

A __slots__ attribute inherited from a superclass has no effect. Python only takes into account __slots__ attributes defined in each class individually.

To define __slots__, you create a class attribute with that name and assign it an iterable of str with identifiers for the instance attributes. I like to use a tuple for that, because it conveys the message that the __slots__ definition cannot change. See Example 9-11.

Example 9-11. vector2d_v3_slots.py: the slots attribute is the only addition to Vector2d

class Vector2d:
    __slots__ = ('__x', '__y')

    typecode = 'd'

    # methods follow (omitted in book listing)

By defining __slots__ in the class, you are telling the interpreter: “These are all the instance attributes in this class.” Python then stores them in a tuple-like structure in each instance, avoiding the memory overhead of the per-instance __dict__. This can make a huge difference in memory usage if you have millions of instances active at the same time.

Tip

If you are handling millions of objects with numeric data, you should really be using NumPy arrays (see “NumPy and SciPy”), which are not only memory-efficient but have highly optimized functions for numeric processing, many of which operate on the entire array at once. I designed the Vector2d class just to provide context when discussing special methods, because I try to avoid vague foo and bar examples when I can.

Example 9-12 shows two runs of a script that simply builds a list, using a list comprehension, with 10,000,000 instances of Vector2d. The mem_test.py script takes the name of a module with a Vector2d class variant as command-line argument. In the first run, I am using vector2d_v3.Vector2d (from Example 9-7); in the second run, the __slots__ version of vector2d_v3_slots.Vector2d is used.

Example 9-12. mem_test.py creates 10 million Vector2d instances using the class defined in the named module (e.g., vector2d_v3.py)

$ time python3 mem_test.py vector2d_v3.py
Selected Vector2d type: vector2d_v3.Vector2d
Creating 10,000,000 Vector2d instances
Initial RAM usage:      5,623,808
  Final RAM usage:  1,558,482,944

real  0m16.721s
user  0m15.568s
sys 0m1.149s
$ time python3 mem_test.py vector2d_v3_slots.py
Selected Vector2d type: vector2d_v3_slots.Vector2d
Creating 10,000,000 Vector2d instances
Initial RAM usage:      5,718,016
  Final RAM usage:    655,466,496

real  0m13.605s
user  0m13.163s
sys 0m0.434s

As Example 9-12 reveals, the RAM footprint of the script grows to 1.5 GB when instance __dict__ is used in each of the 10 million Vector2d instances, but that is reduced to 655 MB when Vector2d has a __slots__ attribute. The __slots__ version is also faster. The mem_test.py script in this test basically deals with loading a module, checking memory usage, and formatting results. The code is not really relevant here so it’s in Appendix A, Example A-4.

Warning

When __slots__ is specified in a class, its instances will not be allowed to have any other attributes apart from those named in __slots__. This is really a side effect, and not the reason why __slots__ exists. It’s considered bad form to use __slots__ just to prevent users of your class from creating new attributes in the instances if they want to. __slots__ should be used for optimization, not for programmer restraint.

It may be possible, however, to “save memory and eat it too”: if you add the '__dict__' name to the __slots__ list, your instances will keep attributes named in __slots__ in the per-instance tuple, but will also support dynamically created attributes, which will be stored in the usual __dict__. Of course, having '__dict__' in __slots__ may entirely defeat its purpose, depending on the number of static and dynamic attributes in each instance and how they are used. Careless optimization is even worse than premature optimization.

There is another special per-instance attribute that you may want to keep: the __weakref__ attribute is necessary for an object to support weak references (covered in “Weak References”). That attribute is present by default in instances of user-defined classes. However, if the class defines __slots__, and you need the instances to be targets of weak references, then you need to include '__weakref__' among the attributes named in __slots__.

To summarize, the __slots__ has some caveats and should not be abused just for the sake of limiting what attributes can be assigned by users. It is mostly useful when working with tabular data such as database records where the schema is fixed by definition and the datasets may be very large. However, if you do this kind of work often, you must check out not only NumPy, but also the pandas data analysis library, which can handle nonnumeric data and import/export to many different tabular data formats.

The Problems with __slots__

The __slots__ class attribute may provide significant memory savings if properly used, but there are a few caveats:

You must remember to redeclare __slots__ in each subclass, because the inherited attribute is ignored by the interpreter.

Instances will only be able to have the attributes listed in __slots__, unless you include '__dict__' in __slots__ (but doing so may negate the memory savings).

Instances cannot be targets of weak references unless you remember to include '__weakref__' in __slots__.

If your program is not handling millions of instances, it’s probably not worth the trouble of creating a somewhat unusual and tricky class whose instances may not accept dynamic attributes or may not support weak references. Like any optimization, __slots__ should be used only if justified by a present need and when its benefit is proven by careful profiling.

The last topic in this chapter has to do with overriding a class attribute in instances and subclasses.

Overriding Class Attributes

A distinctive feature of Python is how class attributes can be used as default values for instance attributes. In Vector2d there is the typecode class attribute. It’s used twice in the __bytes__ method, but we read it as self.typecode by design. Because Vector2d instances are created without a typecode attribute of their own, self.typecode will get the Vector2d.typecode class attribute by default.

But if you write to an instance attribute that does not exist, you create a new instance attribute—e.g., a typecode instance attribute—and the class attribute by the same name is untouched. However, from then on, whenever the code handling that instance reads self.typecode, the instance typecode will be retrieved, effectively shadowing the class attribute by the same name. This opens the possibility of customizing an individual instance with a different typecode.

The default Vector2d.typecode is 'd', meaning each vector component will be represented as an 8-byte double precision float when exporting to bytes. If we set the typecode of a Vector2d instance to 'f' prior to exporting, each component will be exported as a 4-byte single precision float. Example 9-13 demonstrates.

Warning

We are discussing adding a custom instance attribute, therefore Example 9-13 uses the Vector2d implementation without __slots__ as listed in Example 9-9.

Example 9-13. Customizing an instance by setting the typecode attribute that was formerly inherited from the class

>>> from vector2d_v3 import Vector2d
>>> v1 = Vector2d(1.1, 2.2)
>>> dumpd = bytes(v1)
>>> dumpd
b'd\x9a\x99\x99\x99\x99\x99\xf1?\x9a\x99\x99\x99\x99\x99\x01@'
>>> len(dumpd)
17
>>> v1.typecode = 'f'
>>> dumpf = bytes(v1)
>>> dumpf
b'f\xcd\xcc\x8c?\xcd\xcc\x0c@'
>>> len(dumpf)
9
>>> Vector2d.typecode
'd'

Default bytes representation is 17 bytes long.

Set typecode to 'f' in the v1 instance.

Now the bytes dump is 9 bytes long.

Vector2d.typecode is unchanged; only the v1 instance uses typecode 'f'.

Now it should be clear why the bytes export of a Vector2d is prefixed by the typecode: we wanted to support different export formats.

If you want to change a class attribute you must set it on the class directly, not through an instance. You could change the default typecode for all instances (that don’t have their own typecode) by doing this:

>>> Vector2d.typecode = 'f'

However, there is an idiomatic Python way of achieving a more permanent effect, and being more explicit about the change. Because class attributes are public, they are inherited by subclasses, so it’s common practice to subclass just to customize a class data attribute. The Django class-based views use this technique extensively. Example 9-14 shows how.

Example 9-14. The ShortVector2d is a subclass of Vector2d, which only overwrites the default typecode

>>> from vector2d_v3 import Vector2d
>>> class ShortVector2d(Vector2d):
...     typecode = 'f'
...
>>> sv = ShortVector2d(1/11, 1/27)
>>> sv
ShortVector2d(0.09090909090909091, 0.037037037037037035)
>>> len(bytes(sv))
9

Create ShortVector2d as a Vector2d subclass just to overwrite the typecode class attribute.

Build ShortVector2d instance sv for demonstration.

Inspect the repr of sv.

Check that the length of the exported bytes is 9, not 17 as before.

This example also explains why I did not hardcode the class_name in Vecto2d.__repr__, but instead got it from type(self).__name__, like this:

    # inside class Vector2d:

    def __repr__(self):
        class_name = type(self).__name__
        return '{}({!r}, {!r})'.format(class_name, *self)

If I had hardcoded the class_name, subclasses of Vector2d like ShortVector2d would have to overwrite __repr__ just to change the class_name. By reading the name from the type of the instance, I made __repr__ safer to inherit.

This ends our coverage of implementing a simple class that leverages the data model to play well with the rest of Python—offering different object representations, implementing a custom formatting code, exposing read-only attributes, and supporting hash() to integrate with sets and mappings.

Chapter Summary

The aim of this chapter was to demonstrate the use of special methods and conventions in the construction of a well-behaved Pythonic class.

Is vector2d_v3.py (Example 9-9) more Pythonic than vector2d_v0.py (Example 9-2)? The Vector2d class in vector2d_v3.py certainly exhibits more Python features. But whether the first or the last Vector2d implementation is more idiomatic depends on the context where it would be used. Tim Peter’s Zen of Python says:

Simple is better than complex.

A Pythonic object should be as simple as the requirements allow—and not a parade of language features.

But my goal in expanding the Vector2d code was to provide context for discussing Python special methods and coding conventions. If you look back at Table 1-1, the several listings in this chapter demonstrated:

All string/bytes representation methods: __repr__, __str__, __format__, and __bytes__.

Several methods for converting an object to a number: __abs__, __bool__, __hash__.

The __eq__ operator, to test bytes conversion and to enable hashing (along with __hash__).

While supporting conversion to bytes we also implemented an alternative constructor, Vector2d.frombytes(), which provided the context for discussing the decorators @classmethod (very handy) and @staticmethod (not so useful, module-level functions are simpler). The frombytes method was inspired by it’s namesake in the array.array class.

We saw that the Format Specification Mini-Language is extensible by implementing a __format__ method that does some minimal parsing of format_spec provided to the format(obj, format_spec) built-in or within replacement fields '{:«format_spec»}' in strings used with the str.format method.

In preparation to make Vector2d instances hashable, we made an effort to make them immutable, at least preventing accidental changes by coding the x and y attributes as private, and exposing them as read-only properties. We then implemented __hash__ using the recommended technique of xor-ing the hashes of the instance attributes.

We then discussed the memory savings and the caveats of declaring a __slots__ attribute in Vector2d. Because using __slots__ is somewhat tricky, it really makes sense only when handling a very large number of instances—think millions of instances, not just thousands.

The last topic we covered was the overriding of a class attribute accessed via the instances (e.g., self.typecode). We did that first by creating an instance attribute, and then by subclassing and overwriting at the class level.

Throughout the chapter, I mentioned how design choices in the examples were informed by studying the API of standard Python objects. If this chapter can be summarized in one sentence, this is it:

To build Pythonic objects, observe how real Python objects behave.

Ancient Chinese proverb

Further Reading

This chapter covered several special methods of the data model, so naturally the primary references are the same as the ones provided in Chapter 1, which gave a high-level view of the same topic. For convenience, I’ll repeat those four earlier recommendations here, and add a few other ones:

“Data Model” chapter of The Python Language Reference

Most of the methods we used in this chapter are documented in “3.3.1. Basic customization”.

Python in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition, by Alex Martelli

Excellent coverage of the data model, even if only Python 2.5 is covered (in the second edition). The fundamental concepts are all the same and most of the Data Model APIs haven’t changed at all since Python 2.2, when built-in types and user-defined classes became more compatible.

Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition, by David Beazley and Brian K. Jones

Very modern coding practices demonstrated through recipes. Chapter 8, “Classes and Objects” in particular has several solutions related to discussions in this chapter.

Python Essential Reference, 4th Edition, by David Beazley

Covers the data model in detail in the context of Python 2.6 and Python 3.

In this chapter, we covered every special method related to object representation, except __index__. It’s used to coerce an object to an integer index in the specific context of sequence slicing, and was created to solve a need in NumPy. In practice, you and I are not likely to need to implement __index__ unless we decide to write a new numeric data type, and we want it to be usable as arguments to __getitem__. If you are curious about it, A.M. Kuchling’s What’s New in Python 2.5 has a short explanation, and PEP 357 — Allowing Any Object to be Used for Slicing details the need for __index__, from the perspective of an implementor of a C-extension, Travis Oliphant, the lead author of NumPy.

An early realization of the need for distinct string representations for objects appeared in Smalltalk. The 1996 article “How to Display an Object as a String: printString and displayString” by Bobby Woolf discusses the implementation of the printString and displayString methods in that language. From that article, I borrowed the pithy descriptions “the way the developer wants to see it” and “the way the user wants to see it” when defining repr() and str() in “Object Representations”.

Soapbox

Properties Help Reduce Upfront Costs

In the initial versions of Vector2d, the x and y attributes were public, as are all Python instance and class attributes by default. Naturally, users of vectors need to be able to access its components. Although our vectors are iterable and can be unpacked into a pair of variables, it’s also desirable to be able to write my_vector.x and my_vector.y to get each component.

When we felt the need to avoid accidental updates to the x and y attributes, we implemented properties, but nothing changed elsewhere in the code and in the public interface of Vector2d, as verified by the doctests. We are still able to access my_vector.x and my_vector.y.

This shows that we can always start our classes in the simplest possible way, with public attributes, because when (or if) we later need to impose more control with getters and setters, these can be implemented through properties without changing any of the code that already interacts with our objects through the names (e.g., x and y) that were initially simple public attributes.

This approach is the opposite of that encouraged by the Java language: a Java programmer cannot start with simple public attributes and only later, if needed, implement properties, because they don’t exist in the language. Therefore, writing getters and setters is the norm in Java—even when those methods do nothing useful—because the API cannot evolve from simple public attributes to getters and setters without breaking all code that uses those attributes.

In addition, as our technical reviewer Alex Martelli points out, typing getter/setter calls everywhere is goofy. You have to write stuff like:

---
>>> my_object.set_foo(my_object.get_foo() + 1)
---

Just to do this:

---
>>> my_object.foo += 1
---

Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki and an Extreme Programming pioneer, recommends asking “What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?” The idea is to focus on the goal.¹¹ Implementing setters and getters up front is a distraction from the goal. In Python, we can simply use public attributes knowing we can change them to properties later, if the need arises.

Safety Versus Security in Private Attributes

Perl doesn’t have an infatuation with enforced privacy. It would prefer that you stayed out of its living room because you weren’t invited, not because it has a shotgun.

Larry Wall, Creator of Perl

Python and Perl are polar opposites in many regards, but Larry and Guido seem to agree on object privacy.

Having taught Python to many Java programmers over the years, I’ve found a lot of them put too much faith in the privacy guarantees that Java offers. As it turns out, the Java private and protected modifiers normally provide protection against accidents only (i.e., safety). They can only guarantee security against malicious intent if the application is deployed with a security manager, and that seldom happens in practice, even in corporate settings.

To prove my point, I like to show this Java class (Example 9-15).

Example 9-15. Confidential.java: a Java class with a private field named secret

public class Confidential {

    private String secret = "";

    public Confidential(String text) {
        secret = text.toUpperCase();
    }
}

In Example 9-15, I store the text in the secret field after converting it to uppercase, just to make it obvious that whatever is in that field will be in all caps.

The actual demonstration consists of running expose.py with Jython. That script uses introspection (“reflection” in Java parlance) to get the value of a private field. The code is in Example 9-16.

Example 9-16. expose.py: Jython code to read the content of a private field in another class

import Confidential

message = Confidential('top secret text')
secret_field = Confidential.getDeclaredField('secret')
secret_field.setAccessible(True)  # break the lock!
print 'message.secret =', secret_field.get(message)

If you run Example 9-16, this is what you get:

$ jython expose.py
message.secret = TOP SECRET TEXT

The string 'TOP SECRET TEXT' was read from the secret private field of the Confidential class.

There is no black magic here: expose.py uses the Java reflection API to get a reference to the private field named 'secret', and then calls 'secret_field.setAccessible(True)' to make it readable. The same thing can be done with Java code, of course (but it takes more than three times as many lines to do it; see the file Expose.java in the Fluent Python code repository).

The crucial call .setAccessible(True) will fail only if the Jython script or the Java main program (e.g., Expose.class) is running under the supervision of a SecurityManager. But in the real world, Java applications are rarely deployed with a SecurityManager—except for Java applets (remember those?).

My point is: in Java too, access control modifiers are mostly about safety and not security, at least in practice. So relax and enjoy the power Python gives you. Use it responsibly.

¹ From the Paste Style Guide.

² I used eval to clone the object here just to make a point about repr; to clone an instance, the copy.copy function is safer and faster.

³ This line could also be written as yield self.x; yield.self.y. I have a lot more to say about the __iter__ special method, generator expressions, and the yield keyword in Chapter 14.

⁴ We had a brief introduction to memoryview, explaining its .cast method in “Memory Views”.

⁵ Leonardo Rochael, one of the technical reviewers of this book disagrees with my low opinion of staticmethod, and recommends the blog post “The Definitive Guide on How to Use Static, Class or Abstract Methods in Python” by Julien Danjou as a counter-argument. Danjou’s post is very good; I do recommend it. But it wasn’t enough to change my mind about staticmethod. You’ll have to decide for yourself.

⁶ This is not how Ian Bicking would do it; recall the quote at the start of the chapter. The pros and cons of private attributes are the subject of the upcoming “Private and “Protected” Attributes in Python”.

⁷ From the Paste Style Guide.

⁸ In modules, a single _ in front of a top-level name does have an effect: if you write from mymod import * the names with a _ prefix are not imported from mymod. However, you can still write from mymod import _privatefunc. This is explained in the Python Tutorial, section 6.1. More on Modules.

⁹ One example is in the gettext module docs.

¹⁰ If this state of affairs depresses you, and makes you wish Python was more like Java in this regard, don’t read my discussion of the relative strength of the Java private modifier in “Soapbox”.

¹¹ See “Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work: A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, Part V”.

Chapter 10. Sequence Hacking, Hashing, and Slicing

Don’t check whether it is-a duck: check whether it quacks-like-a duck, walks-like-a duck, etc, etc, depending on exactly what subset of duck-like behavior you need to play your language-games with. (comp.lang.python, Jul. 26, 2000)

Alex Martelli

In this chapter, we will create a class to represent a multidimensional Vector class—a significant step up from the two-dimensional Vector2d of Chapter 9. Vector will behave like a standard Python immutable flat sequence. Its elements will be floats, and it will support the following by the end of this chapter:

Basic sequence protocol: __len__ and __getitem__.

Safe representation of instances with many items.

Proper slicing support, producing new Vector instances.

Aggregate hashing taking into account every contained element value.

Custom formatting language extension.

We’ll also implement dynamic attribute access with __getattr__ as a way of replacing the read-only properties we used in Vector2d—although this is not typical of sequence types.

The code-intensive presentation will be interrupted by a conceptual discussion about the idea of protocols as an informal interface. We’ll talk about how protocols and duck typing are related, and its practical implications when you create your own types.

Let’s get started.

Vector Applications Beyond Three Dimensions

Who needs a vector with 1,000 dimensions? Hint: not 3D artists! However, n-dimensional vectors (with large values of n) are widely used in information retrieval, where documents and text queries are represented as vectors, with one dimension per word. This is called the Vector space model. In this model, a key relevance metric is the cosine similarity (i.e., the cosine of the angle between a query vector and a document vector). As the angle decreases, the cosine approaches the maximum value of 1, and so does the relevance of the document to the query.

Having said that, the Vector class in this chapter is a didactic example and we’ll not do much math here. Our goal is just to demonstrate some Python special methods in the context of a sequence type.

NumPy and SciPy are the tools you need for real-world vector math. The PyPI package gensim, by Radim Rehurek, implements vector space modeling for natural language processing and information retrieval, using NumPy and SciPy.

Vector: A User-Defined Sequence Type

Our strategy to implement Vector will be to use composition, not inheritance. We’ll store the components in an array of floats, and will implement the methods needed for our Vector to behave like an immutable flat sequence.

But before we implement the sequence methods, let’s make sure we have a baseline implementation of Vector that is compatible with our earlier Vector2d class—except where such compatibility would not make sense.

Vector Take #1: Vector2d Compatible

The first version of Vector should be as compatible as possible with our earlier Vector2d class.

However, by design, the Vector constructor is not compatible with the Vector2d constructor. We could make Vector(3, 4) and Vector(3, 4, 5) work, by taking arbitrary arguments with *args in __init__, but the best practice for a sequence constructor is to take the data as an iterable argument in the constructor, like all built-in sequence types do. Example 10-1 shows some ways of instantiating our new Vector objects.

Example 10-1. Tests of Vector.__init__ and Vector.__repr__

>>> Vector([3.1, 4.2])
Vector([3.1, 4.2])
>>> Vector((3, 4, 5))
Vector([3.0, 4.0, 5.0])
>>> Vector(range(10))
Vector([0.0, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, ...])

Apart from new constructor signature, I made sure every test I did with Vector2d (e.g., Vector2d(3, 4)) passed and produced the same result with a two-component Vector([3, 4]).

Warning

When a Vector has more than six components, the string produced by repr() is abbreviated with ... as seen in the last line of Example 10-1. This is crucial in any collection type that may contain a large number of items, because repr is used for debugging (and you don’t want a single large object to span thousands of lines in your console or log). Use the reprlib module to produce limited-length representations, as in Example 10-2.

The reprlib module is called repr in Python 2. The 2to3 tool rewrites imports from repr automatically.

Example 10-2 lists the implementation of our first version of Vector (this example builds on the code shown in Examples 9-2 and 9-3).

Example 10-2. vector_v1.py: derived from vector2d_v1.py

from array import array
import reprlib
import math

class Vector:
    typecode = 'd'

    def __init__(self, components):
        self._components = array(self.typecode, components)

    def __iter__(self):
        return iter(self._components)

    def __repr__(self):
        components = reprlib.repr(self._components)
        components = components[components.find('['):-1]
        return 'Vector({})'.format(components)

    def __str__(self):
        return str(tuple(self))

    def __bytes__(self):
        return (bytes([ord(self.typecode)]) +
                bytes(self._components))

    def __eq__(self, other):
        return tuple(self) == tuple(other)

    def __abs__(self):
        return math.sqrt(sum(x * x for x in self))

    def __bool__(self):
        return bool(abs(self))

    @classmethod
    def frombytes(cls, octets):
        typecode = chr(octets[0])
        memv = memoryview(octets[1:]).cast(typecode)
        return cls(memv)

The self._components instance “protected” attribute will hold an array with the Vector components.

To allow iteration, we return an iterator over self._components.¹

Use reprlib.repr() to get a limited-length representation of self._components (e.g., array('d', [0.0, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, ...])).

Remove the array('d', prefix and the trailing ) before plugging the string into a Vector constructor call.

Build a bytes object directly from self._components.

We can’t use hypot anymore, so we sum the squares of the components and compute the sqrt of that.

The only change needed from the earlier frombytes is in the last line: we pass the memoryview directly to the constructor, without unpacking with * as we did before.

The way I used reprlib.repr deserves some elaboration. That function produces safe representations of large or recursive structures by limiting the length of the output string and marking the cut with '...'. I wanted the repr of a Vector to look like Vector([3.0, 4.0, 5.0]) and not Vector(array('d', [3.0, 4.0, 5.0])), because the fact that there is an array inside a Vector is an implementation detail. Because these constructor calls build identical Vector objects, I prefer the simpler syntax using a list argument.

When coding __repr__, I could have produced the simplified components display with this expression: reprlib.repr(list(self._components)). However, this would be wasteful, as I’d be copying every item from self._components to a list just to use the list repr. Instead, I decided to apply reprlib.repr to the self._components array directly, and then chop off the characters outside of the []. That’s what the second line of __repr__ does in Example 10-2.

Tip

Because of its role in debugging, calling repr() on an object should never raise an exception. If something goes wrong inside your implementation of __repr__, you must deal with the issue and do your best to produce some serviceable output that gives the user a chance of identifying the target object.

Note that the __str__, __eq__, and __bool__ methods are unchanged from Vector2d, and only one character was changed in frombytes (a * was removed in the last line). This is one of the benefits of making the original Vector2d iterable.

By the way, we could have subclassed Vector from Vector2d, but I chose not to do it for two reasons. First, the incompatible constructors really make subclassing not advisable. I could work around that with some clever parameter handling in __init__, but the second reason is more important: I want Vector to be a standalone example of a class implementing the sequence protocol. That’s what we’ll do next, after a discussion of the term protocol.

Protocols and Duck Typing

As early as Chapter 1, we saw that you don’t need to inherit from any special class to create a fully functional sequence type in Python; you just need to implement the methods that fulfill the sequence protocol. But what kind of protocol are we talking about?

In the context of object-oriented programming, a protocol is an informal interface, defined only in documentation and not in code. For example, the sequence protocol in Python entails just the __len__ and __getitem__ methods. Any class Spam that implements those methods with the standard signature and semantics can be used anywhere a sequence is expected. Whether Spam is a subclass of this or that is irrelevant; all that matters is that it provides the necessary methods. We saw that in Example 1-1, reproduced here in Example 10-3.

Example 10-3. Code from Example 1-1, reproduced here for convenience

import collections

Card = collections.namedtuple('Card', ['rank', 'suit'])

class FrenchDeck:
    ranks = [str(n) for n in range(2, 11)] + list('JQKA')
    suits = 'spades diamonds clubs hearts'.split()

    def __init__(self):
        self._cards = [Card(rank, suit) for suit in self.suits
                                        for rank in self.ranks]

    def __len__(self):
        return len(self._cards)

    def __getitem__(self, position):
        return self._cards[position]

The FrenchDeck class in Example 10-3 takes advantage of many Python facilities because it implements the sequence protocol, even if that is not declared anywhere in the code. Any experienced Python coder will look at it and understand that it is a sequence, even if it subclasses object. We say it is a sequence because it behaves like one, and that is what matters.

This became known as duck typing, after Alex Martelli’s post quoted at the beginning of this chapter.

Because protocols are informal and unenforced, you can often get away with implementing just part of a protocol, if you know the specific context where a class will be used. For example, to support iteration, only __getitem__ is required; there is no need to provide __len__.

We’ll now implement the sequence protocol in Vector, initially without proper support for slicing, but later adding that.

Vector Take #2: A Sliceable Sequence

As we saw with the FrenchDeck example, supporting the sequence protocol is really easy if you can delegate to a sequence attribute in your object, like our self._components array. These __len__ and __getitem__ one-liners are a good start:

class Vector:
    # many lines omitted
    # ...

    def __len__(self):
        return len(self._components)

    def __getitem__(self, index):
        return self._components[index]

With these additions, all of these operations now work:

>>> v1 = Vector([3, 4, 5])
>>> len(v1)
3
>>> v1[0], v1[-1]
(3.0, 5.0)
>>> v7 = Vector(range(7))
>>> v7[1:4]
array('d', [1.0, 2.0, 3.0])

As you can see, even slicing is supported—but not very well. It would be better if a slice of a Vector was also a Vector instance and not a array. The old FrenchDeck class has a similar problem: when you slice it, you get a list. In the case of Vector, a lot of functionality is lost when slicing produces plain arrays.

Consider the built-in sequence types: every one of them, when sliced, produces a new instance of its own type, and not of some other type.

To make Vector produce slices as Vector instances, we can’t just delegate the slicing to array. We need to analyze the arguments we get in __getitem__ and do the right thing.

Now, let’s see how Python turns the syntax my_seq[1:3] into arguments for my_seq.__getitem__(...).

How Slicing Works

A demo is worth a thousand words, so take a look at Example 10-4.

Example 10-4. Checking out the behavior of __getitem__ and slices

>>> class MySeq:
...     def __getitem__(self, index):
...         return index
...
>>> s = MySeq()
>>> s[1]
1
>>> s[1:4]
slice(1, 4, None)
>>> s[1:4:2]
slice(1, 4, 2)
>>> s[1:4:2, 9]
(slice(1, 4, 2), 9)
>>> s[1:4:2, 7:9]
(slice(1, 4, 2), slice(7, 9, None))

For this demonstration, __getitem__ merely returns whatever is passed to it.

A single index, nothing new.

The notation 1:4 becomes slice(1, 4, None).

slice(1, 4, 2) means start at 1, stop at 4, step by 2.

Surprise: the presence of commas inside the [] means __getitem__ receives a tuple.

The tuple may even hold several slice objects.

Now let’s take a closer look at slice itself in Example 10-5.

Example 10-5. Inspecting the attributes of the slice class

>>> slice
<class 'slice'>
>>> dir(slice)
['__class__', '__delattr__', '__dir__', '__doc__', '__eq__',
 '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__gt__',
 '__hash__', '__init__', '__le__', '__lt__', '__ne__',
 '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__',
 '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__',
 'indices', 'start', 'step', 'stop']

slice is a built-in type (we saw it first in “Slice Objects”).

Inspecting a slice we find the data attributes start, stop, and step, and an indices method.

In Example 10-5, calling dir(slice) reveals an indices attribute, which turns out to be a very interesting but little-known method. Here is what help(slice.indices) reveals:

S.indices(len) -> (start, stop, stride)

Assuming a sequence of length len, calculate the start and stop indices, and the stride length of the extended slice described by S. Out of bounds indices are clipped in a manner consistent with the handling of normal slices.

In other words, indices exposes the tricky logic that’s implemented in the built-in sequences to gracefully handle missing or negative indices and slices that are longer than the target sequence. This method produces “normalized” tuples of nonnegative start, stop, and stride integers adjusted to fit within the bounds of a sequence of the given length.

Here are a couple of examples, considering a sequence of len == 5, e.g., 'ABCDE':

>>> slice(None, 10, 2).indices(5)
(0, 5, 2)
>>> slice(-3, None, None).indices(5)
(2, 5, 1)

'ABCDE'[:10:2] is the same as 'ABCDE'[0:5:2]

'ABCDE'[-3:] is the same as 'ABCDE'[2:5:1]

Note

As I write this, the slice.indices method is apparently not documented in the online Python Library Reference. The Python Python/C API Reference Manual documents a similar C-level function, PySlice_GetIndicesEx. I discovered slice.indices while exploring slice objects in the Python console, using dir() and help(). Yet another evidence of the value of the interactive console as a discovery tool.

In our Vector code, we’ll not need the slice.indices() method because when we get a slice argument we’ll delegate its handling to the _components array. But if you can’t count on the services of an underlying sequence, this method can be a huge time saver.

Now that we know how to handle slices, let’s take a look at the improved Vector.__getitem__ implementation.

A Slice-Aware __getitem__

Example 10-6 lists the two methods needed to make Vector behave as a sequence: __len__ and __getitem__ (the latter now implemented to handle slicing correctly).

Example 10-6. Part of vector_v2.py: __len__ and __getitem__ methods added to Vector class from vector_v1.py (see Example 10-2)

    def __len__(self):
        return len(self._components)

    def __getitem__(self, index):
        cls = type(self)
        if isinstance(index, slice):
            return cls(self._components[index])
        elif isinstance(index, numbers.Integral):
            return self._components[index]
        else:
            msg = '{cls.__name__} indices must be integers'
            raise TypeError(msg.format(cls=cls))

Get the class of the instance (i.e., Vector) for later use.

If the index argument is a slice…

…invoke the class to build another Vector instance from a slice of the _components array.

If the index is an int or some other kind of integer…

…just return the specific item from _components.

Otherwise, raise an exception.

Note

Excessive use of isinstance may be a sign of bad OO design, but handling slices in __getitem__ is a justified use case. Note in Example 10-6 the test against numbers.Integral—an Abstract Base Class. Using ABCs in isinstance tests makes an API more flexible and future-proof. Chapter 11 explains why. Unfortunately, there is no ABC for slice in the Python 3.4 standard library.

To discover which exception to raise in the else clause of __getitem__, I used the interactive console to check the result of 'ABC'[1, 2]. I then learned that Python raises a TypeError, and I also copied the wording from the error message: “indices must be integers.” To create Pythonic objects, mimic Python’s own objects.

Once the code in Example 10-6 is added to the Vector class, we have proper slicing behavior, as Example 10-7 demonstrates.

Example 10-7. Tests of enhanced Vector.getitem from Example 10-6

    >>> v7 = Vector(range(7))
    >>> v7[-1]
    6.0
    >>> v7[1:4]
    Vector([1.0, 2.0, 3.0])
    >>> v7[-1:]
    Vector([6.0])
    >>> v7[1,2]
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      ...
    TypeError: Vector indices must be integers

An integer index retrieves just one component value as a float.

A slice index creates a new Vector.

A slice of len == 1 also creates a Vector.

Vector does not support multidimensional indexing, so a tuple of indices or slices raises an error.

Vector Take #3: Dynamic Attribute Access

In the evolution from Vector2d to Vector, we lost the ability to access vector components by name (e.g., v.x, v.y). We are now dealing with vectors that may have a large number of components. Still, it may be convenient to access the first few components with shortcut letters such as x, y, z instead of v[0], v[1] and v[2].

Here is the alternative syntax we want to provide for reading the first four components of a vector:

>>> v = Vector(range(10))
>>> v.x
0.0
>>> v.y, v.z, v.t
(1.0, 2.0, 3.0)

In Vector2d, we provided read-only access to x and y using the @property decorator (Example 9-7). We could write four properties in Vector, but it would be tedious. The __getattr__ special method provides a better way.

“The __getattr__ method is invoked by the interpreter when attribute lookup fails. In simple terms, given the expression my_obj.x, Python checks if the my_obj instance has an attribute named x; if not, the search goes to the class (my_obj.__class__), and then up the inheritance graph.² If the x attribute is not found, then the __getattr__ method defined in the class of my_obj is called with self and the name of the attribute as a string (e.g., 'x').

Example 10-8 lists our __getattr__ method. Essentially it checks whether the attribute being sought is one of the letters xyzt and if so, returns the corresponding vector component.

Example 10-8. Part of vector_v3.py: __getattr__ method added to Vector class from vector_v2.py

    shortcut_names = 'xyzt'

    def __getattr__(self, name):
        cls = type(self)
        if len(name) == 1:
            pos = cls.shortcut_names.find(name)
            if 0 <= pos < len(self._components):
                return self._components[pos]
        msg = '{.__name__!r} object has no attribute {!r}'
        raise AttributeError(msg.format(cls, name))

Get the Vector class for later use.

If the name is one character, it may be one of the shortcut_names.

Find position of 1-letter name; str.find would also locate 'yz' and we don’t want that, this is the reason for the test above.

If the position is within range, return the array element.

If either test failed, raise AttributeError with a standard message text.

It’s not hard to implement __getattr__, but in this case it’s not enough. Consider the bizarre interaction in Example 10-9.

Example 10-9. Inappropriate behavior: assigning to v.x raises no error, but introduces an inconsistency

>>> v = Vector(range(5))
>>> v
Vector([0.0, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0])
>>> v.x
0.0
>>> v.x = 10
>>> v.x
10
>>> v
Vector([0.0, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0])

Access element v[0] as v.x.

Assign new value to v.x. This should raise an exception.

Reading v.x shows the new value, 10.

However, the vector components did not change.

Can you explain what is happening? In particular, why the second time v.x returns 10 if that value is not in the vector components array? If you don’t know right off the bat, study the explanation of __getattr__ given right before Example 10-8. It’s a bit subtle, but a very important foundation to understand a lot of what comes later in the book.

The inconsistency in Example 10-9 was introduced because of the way __getattr__ works: Python only calls that method as a fall back, when the object does not have the named attribute. However, after we assign v.x = 10, the v object now has an x attribute, so __getattr__ will no longer be called to retrieve v.x: the interpreter will just return the value 10 that is bound to v.x. On the other hand, our implementation of __getattr__ pays no attention to instance attributes other than self._components, from where it retrieves the values of the “virtual attributes” listed in shortcut_names.

We need to customize the logic for setting attributes in our Vector class in order to avoid this inconsistency.

Recall that in the latest Vector2d examples from Chapter 9, trying to assign to the .x or .y instance attributes raised AttributeError. In Vector we want the same exception with any attempt at assigning to all single-letter lowercase attribute names, just to avoid confusion. To do that, we’ll implement __setattr__ as listed in Example 10-10.

Example 10-10. Part of vector_v3.py: __setattr__ method in Vector class

    def __setattr__(self, name, value):
        cls = type(self)
        if len(name) == 1:
            if name in cls.shortcut_names:
                error = 'readonly attribute {attr_name!r}'
            elif name.islower():
                error = "can't set attributes 'a' to 'z' in {cls_name!r}"
            else:
                error = ''
            if error:
                msg = error.format(cls_name=cls.__name__, attr_name=name)
                raise AttributeError(msg)
        super().__setattr__(name, value)

Special handling for single-character attribute names.

If name is one of xyzt, set specific error message.

If name is lowercase, set error message about all single-letter names.

Otherwise, set blank error message.

If there is a nonblank error message, raise AttributeError.

Default case: call __setattr__ on superclass for standard behavior.

Tip

The super() function provides a way to access methods of superclasses dynamically, a necessity in a dynamic language supporting multiple inheritance like Python. It’s used to delegate some task from a method in a subclass to a suitable method in a superclass, as seen in Example 10-10. There is more about super in “Multiple Inheritance and Method Resolution Order”.

While choosing the error message to display with AttributeError, my first check was the behavior of the built-in complex type, because they are immutable and have a pair of data attributes real and imag. Trying to change either of those in a complex instance raises AttributeError with the message "can't set attribute". On the other hand, trying to set a read-only attribute protected by a property as we did in “A Hashable Vector2d” produces the message "readonly attribute". I drew inspiration from both wordings to set the error string in __setitem__, but was more explicit about the forbidden attributes.

Note that we are not disallowing setting all attributes, only single-letter, lowercase ones, to avoid confusion with the supported read-only attributes x, y, z, and t.

Warning

Knowing that declaring __slots__ at the class level prevents setting new instance attributes, it’s tempting to use that feature instead of implementing __setattr__ as we did. However, because of all the caveats discussed in “The Problems with __slots__”, using __slots__ just to prevent instance attribute creation is not recommended. __slots__ should be used only to save memory, and only if that is a real issue.

Even without supporting writing to the Vector components, here is an important takeaway from this example: very often when you implement __getattr__ you need to code __setattr__ as well, to avoid inconsistent behavior in your objects.

If we wanted to allow changing components, we could implement __setitem__ to enable v[0] = 1.1 and/or __setattr__ to make v.x = 1.1 work. But Vector will remain immutable because we want to make it hashable in the coming section.

Vector Take #4: Hashing and a Faster ==

Once more we get to implement a __hash__ method. Together with the existing __eq__, this will make Vector instances hashable.

The __hash__ in Example 9-8 simply computed hash(self.x) ^ hash(self.y). We now would like to apply the ^ (xor) operator to the hashes of every component, in succession, like this: v[0] ^ v[1] ^ v[2]…. That is what the functools.reduce function is for. Previously I said that reduce is not as popular as before,³ but computing the hash of all vector components is a perfect job for it. Figure 10-1 depicts the general idea of the reduce function.

Figure 10-1. Reducing functions—reduce, sum, any, all—produce a single aggregate result from a sequence or from any finite iterable object.

So far we’ve seen that functools.reduce() can be replaced by sum(), but now let’s properly explain how it works. The key idea is to reduce a series of values to a single value. The first argument to reduce() is a two-argument function, and the second argument is an iterable. Let’s say we have a two-argument function fn and a list lst. When you call reduce(fn, lst), fn will be applied to the first pair of elements—fn(lst[0], lst[1])—producing a first result, r1. Then fn is applied to r1 and the next element—fn(r1, lst[2])—producing a second result, r2. Now fn(r2, lst[3]) is called to produce r3 … and so on until the last element, when a single result, rN, is returned.

Here is how you could use reduce to compute 5! (the factorial of 5):

>>> 2 * 3 * 4 * 5  # the result we want: 5! == 120
120
>>> import functools
>>> functools.reduce(lambda a,b: a*b, range(1, 6))
120

Back to our hashing problem, Example 10-11 shows the idea of computing the aggregate xor by doing it in three ways: with a for loop and two reduce calls.

Example 10-11. Three ways of calculating the accumulated xor of integers from 0 to 5

>>> n = 0
>>> for i in range(1, 6):
...     n ^= i
...
>>> n
1
>>> import functools
>>> functools.reduce(lambda a, b: a^b, range(6))
1
>>> import operator
>>> functools.reduce(operator.xor, range(6))
1

Aggregate xor with a for loop and an accumulator variable.

functools.reduce using an anonymous function.

functools.reduce replacing custom lambda with operator.xor.

From the alternatives in Example 10-11, the last one is my favorite, and the for loop comes second. What is your preference?

As seen in “The operator Module”, operator provides the functionality of all Python infix operators in function form, lessening the need for lambda.

To code Vector.__hash__ in my preferred style, we need to import the functools and operator modules. Example 10-12 shows the relevant changes.

Example 10-12. Part of vector_v4.py: two imports and __hash__ method added to Vector class from vector_v3.py

from array import array
import reprlib
import math
import functools
import operator

class Vector:
    typecode = 'd'

    # many lines omitted in book listing...

    def __eq__(self, other):
        return tuple(self) == tuple(other)

    def __hash__(self):
        hashes = (hash(x) for x in self._components)
        return functools.reduce(operator.xor, hashes, 0)

    # more lines omitted...

Import functools to use reduce.

Import operator to use xor.

No change to __eq__; I listed it here because it’s good practice to keep __eq__ and __hash__ close in source code, because they need to work together.

Create a generator expression to lazily compute the hash of each component.

Feed hashes to reduce with the xor function to compute the aggregate hash value; the third argument, 0, is the initializer (see next warning).

Warning

When using reduce, it’s good practice to provide the third argument, reduce(function, iterable, initializer), to prevent this exception: TypeError: reduce() of empty sequence with no initial value (excellent message: explains the problem and how to fix it). The initializer is the value returned if the sequence is empty and is used as the first argument in the reducing loop, so it should be the identity value of the operation. As examples, for +, |, ^ the initializer should be 0, but for *, & it should be 1.

As implemented, the __hash__ method in Example 10-12 is a perfect example of a map-reduce computation (Figure 10-2).

Figure 10-2. Map-reduce: apply function to each item to generate a new series (map), then compute aggregate (reduce)

The mapping step produces one hash for each component, and the reduce step aggregates all hashes with the xor operator. Using map instead of a genexp makes the mapping step even more visible:

    def __hash__(self):
        hashes = map(hash, self._components)
        return functools.reduce(operator.xor, hashes)

Tip

The solution with map would be less efficient in Python 2, where the map function builds a new list with the results. But in Python 3, map is lazy: it creates a generator that yields the results on demand, thus saving memory—just like the generator expression we used in the __hash__ method of Example 10-8.

While we are on the topic of reducing functions, we can replace our quick implementation of __eq__ with another one that will be cheaper in terms of processing and memory, at least for large vectors. As introduced in Example 9-2, we have this very concise implementation of __eq__:

    def __eq__(self, other):
        return tuple(self) == tuple(other)

This works for Vector2d and for Vector—it even considers Vector([1, 2]) equal to (1, 2), which may be a problem, but we’ll overlook that for now.⁴ But for Vector instances that may have thousands of components, it’s very inefficient. It builds two tuples copying the entire contents of the operands just to use the __eq__ of the tuple type. For Vector2d (with only two components), it’s a good shortcut, but not for the large multidimensional vectors. A better way of comparing one Vector to another Vector or iterable would be Example 10-13.

Example 10-13. Vector.eq using zip in a for loop for more efficient comparison

    def __eq__(self, other):
        if len(self) != len(other):
            return False
        for a, b in zip(self, other):
            if a != b:
                return False
        return True

If the len of the objects are different, they are not equal.

zip produces a generator of tuples made from the items in each iterable argument. See “The Awesome zip” if zip is new to you. The len comparison above is needed because zip stops producing values without warning as soon as one of the inputs is exhausted.

As soon as two components are different, exit returning False.

Otherwise, the objects are equal.

Example 10-13 is efficient, but the all function can produce the same aggregate computation of the for loop in one line: if all comparisons between corresponding components in the operands are True, the result is True. As soon as one comparison is False, all returns False. Example 10-14 shows how __eq__ looks using all.

Example 10-14. Vector.eq using zip and all: same logic as Example 10-13

    def __eq__(self, other):
        return len(self) == len(other) and all(a == b for a, b in zip(self, other))

Note that we first check that the operands have equal length, because zip will stop at the shortest operand.

Example 10-14 is the implementation we choose for __eq__ in vector_v4.py.

We wrap up this chapter by bringing back the __format__ method from Vector2d to Vector.

The Awesome zip

Having a for loop that iterates over items without fiddling with index variables is great and prevents lots of bugs, but demands some special utility functions. One of them is the zip built-in, which makes it easy to iterate in parallel over two or more iterables by returning tuples that you can unpack into variables, one for each item in the parallel inputs. See Example 10-15.

Tip

The zip function is named after the zipper fastener because the physical device works by interlocking pairs of teeth taken from both zipper sides, a good visual analogy for what zip(left, right) does. No relation with compressed files.

Example 10-15. The zip built-in at work

>>> zip(range(3), 'ABC')
<zip object at 0x10063ae48>
>>> list(zip(range(3), 'ABC'))
[(0, 'A'), (1, 'B'), (2, 'C')]
>>> list(zip(range(3), 'ABC', [0.0, 1.1, 2.2, 3.3]))
[(0, 'A', 0.0), (1, 'B', 1.1), (2, 'C', 2.2)]
>>> from itertools import zip_longest
>>> list(zip_longest(range(3), 'ABC', [0.0, 1.1, 2.2, 3.3], fillvalue=-1))
[(0, 'A', 0.0), (1, 'B', 1.1), (2, 'C', 2.2), (-1, -1, 3.3)]

zip returns a generator that produces tuples on demand.

Here we build a list from it just for display; usually we iterate over the generator.

zip has a surprising trait: it stops without warning when one of the iterables is exhausted.⁵

The itertools.zip_longest function behaves differently: it uses an optional fillvalue (None by default) to complete missing values so it can generate tuples until the last iterable is exhausted.

The enumerate built-in is another generator function often used in for loops to avoid manual handling of index variables. If you are not familiar with enumerate, you should definitely check it out in the “Built-in functions” documentation. The zip and enumerate built-ins, along with several other generator functions in the standard library, are covered in “Generator Functions in the Standard Library”.

Vector Take #5: Formatting

The __format__ method of Vector will resemble that of Vector2d, but instead of providing a custom display in polar coordinates, Vector will use spherical coordinates—also known as “hyperspherical” coordinates, because now we support n dimensions, and spheres are “hyperspheres” in 4D and beyond.⁶ Accordingly, we’ll change the custom format suffix from 'p' to 'h'.

Tip

As we saw in “Formatted Displays”, when extending the Format Specification Mini-Language it’s best to avoid reusing format codes supported by built-in types. In particular, our extended mini-language also uses the float formatting codes 'eEfFgGn%' in their original meaning, so we definitely must avoid these. Integers use 'bcdoxXn' and strings use 's'. I picked 'p' for Vector2d polar coordinates. Code 'h' for hyperspherical coordinates is a good choice.

For example, given a Vector object in 4D space (len(v) == 4), the 'h' code will produce a display like <r, Φ₁, Φ₂, Φ₃> where r is the magnitude (abs(v)) and the remaining numbers are the angular coordinates Φ₁, Φ₂, Φ₃.

Here are some samples of the spherical coordinate format in 4D, taken from the doctests of vector_v5.py (see Example 10-16):

>>> format(Vector([-1, -1, -1, -1]), 'h')
'<2.0, 2.0943951023931957, 2.186276035465284, 3.9269908169872414>'
>>> format(Vector([2, 2, 2, 2]), '.3eh')
'<4.000e+00, 1.047e+00, 9.553e-01, 7.854e-01>'
>>> format(Vector([0, 1, 0, 0]), '0.5fh')
'<1.00000, 1.57080, 0.00000, 0.00000>'

Before we can implement the minor changes required in __format__, we need to code a pair of support methods: angle(n) to compute one of the angular coordinates (e.g., Φ₁), and angles() to return an iterable of all angular coordinates. I’ll not describe the math here; if you’re curious, Wikipedia’s "n-sphere” entry has the formulas I used to calculate the spherical coordinates from the Cartesian coordinates in the Vector components array.

Example 10-16 is a full listing of vector_v5.py consolidating all we’ve implemented since “Vector Take #1: Vector2d Compatible” and introducing custom formatting.

Example 10-16. vector_v5.py: doctests and all code for final Vector class; callouts highlight additions needed to support __format__

"""
A multidimensional ``Vector`` class, take 5

A ``Vector`` is built from an iterable of numbers::

    >>> Vector([3.1, 4.2])
    Vector([3.1, 4.2])
    >>> Vector((3, 4, 5))
    Vector([3.0, 4.0, 5.0])
    >>> Vector(range(10))
    Vector([0.0, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, ...])

Tests with two dimensions (same results as ``vector2d_v1.py``)::

    >>> v1 = Vector([3, 4])
    >>> x, y = v1
    >>> x, y
    (3.0, 4.0)
    >>> v1
    Vector([3.0, 4.0])
    >>> v1_clone = eval(repr(v1))
    >>> v1 == v1_clone
    True
    >>> print(v1)
    (3.0, 4.0)
    >>> octets = bytes(v1)
    >>> octets
    b'd\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x08@\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x10@'
    >>> abs(v1)
    5.0
    >>> bool(v1), bool(Vector([0, 0]))
    (True, False)

Test of ``.frombytes()`` class method:

    >>> v1_clone = Vector.frombytes(bytes(v1))
    >>> v1_clone
    Vector([3.0, 4.0])
    >>> v1 == v1_clone
    True

Tests with three dimensions::

    >>> v1 = Vector([3, 4, 5])
    >>> x, y, z = v1
    >>> x, y, z
    (3.0, 4.0, 5.0)
    >>> v1
    Vector([3.0, 4.0, 5.0])
    >>> v1_clone = eval(repr(v1))
    >>> v1 == v1_clone
    True
    >>> print(v1)
    (3.0, 4.0, 5.0)
    >>> abs(v1)  # doctest:+ELLIPSIS
    7.071067811...
    >>> bool(v1), bool(Vector([0, 0, 0]))
    (True, False)

Tests with many dimensions::

    >>> v7 = Vector(range(7))
    >>> v7
    Vector([0.0, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, ...])
    >>> abs(v7)  # doctest:+ELLIPSIS
    9.53939201...

Test of ``.__bytes__`` and ``.frombytes()`` methods::

    >>> v1 = Vector([3, 4, 5])
    >>> v1_clone = Vector.frombytes(bytes(v1))
    >>> v1_clone
    Vector([3.0, 4.0, 5.0])
    >>> v1 == v1_clone
    True

Tests of sequence behavior::

    >>> v1 = Vector([3, 4, 5])
    >>> len(v1)
    3
    >>> v1[0], v1[len(v1)-1], v1[-1]
    (3.0, 5.0, 5.0)

Test of slicing::

    >>> v7 = Vector(range(7))
    >>> v7[-1]
    6.0
    >>> v7[1:4]
    Vector([1.0, 2.0, 3.0])
    >>> v7[-1:]
    Vector([6.0])
    >>> v7[1,2]
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      ...
    TypeError: Vector indices must be integers

Tests of dynamic attribute access::

    >>> v7 = Vector(range(10))
    >>> v7.x
    0.0
    >>> v7.y, v7.z, v7.t
    (1.0, 2.0, 3.0)

Dynamic attribute lookup failures::

    >>> v7.k
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      ...
    AttributeError: 'Vector' object has no attribute 'k'
    >>> v3 = Vector(range(3))
    >>> v3.t
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      ...
    AttributeError: 'Vector' object has no attribute 't'
    >>> v3.spam
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      ...
    AttributeError: 'Vector' object has no attribute 'spam'

Tests of hashing::

    >>> v1 = Vector([3, 4])
    >>> v2 = Vector([3.1, 4.2])
    >>> v3 = Vector([3, 4, 5])
    >>> v6 = Vector(range(6))
    >>> hash(v1), hash(v3), hash(v6)
    (7, 2, 1)

Most hash values of non-integers vary from a 32-bit to 64-bit CPython build::

    >>> import sys
    >>> hash(v2) == (384307168202284039 if sys.maxsize > 2**32 else 357915986)
    True

Tests of ``format()`` with Cartesian coordinates in 2D::

    >>> v1 = Vector([3, 4])
    >>> format(v1)
    '(3.0, 4.0)'
    >>> format(v1, '.2f')
    '(3.00, 4.00)'
    >>> format(v1, '.3e')
    '(3.000e+00, 4.000e+00)'

Tests of ``format()`` with Cartesian coordinates in 3D and 7D::

    >>> v3 = Vector([3, 4, 5])
    >>> format(v3)
    '(3.0, 4.0, 5.0)'
    >>> format(Vector(range(7)))
    '(0.0, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0)'

Tests of ``format()`` with spherical coordinates in 2D, 3D and 4D::

    >>> format(Vector([1, 1]), 'h')  # doctest:+ELLIPSIS
    '<1.414213..., 0.785398...>'
    >>> format(Vector([1, 1]), '.3eh')
    '<1.414e+00, 7.854e-01>'
    >>> format(Vector([1, 1]), '0.5fh')
    '<1.41421, 0.78540>'
    >>> format(Vector([1, 1, 1]), 'h')  # doctest:+ELLIPSIS
    '<1.73205..., 0.95531..., 0.78539...>'
    >>> format(Vector([2, 2, 2]), '.3eh')
    '<3.464e+00, 9.553e-01, 7.854e-01>'
    >>> format(Vector([0, 0, 0]), '0.5fh')
    '<0.00000, 0.00000, 0.00000>'
    >>> format(Vector([-1, -1, -1, -1]), 'h')  # doctest:+ELLIPSIS
    '<2.0, 2.09439..., 2.18627..., 3.92699...>'
    >>> format(Vector([2, 2, 2, 2]), '.3eh')
    '<4.000e+00, 1.047e+00, 9.553e-01, 7.854e-01>'
    >>> format(Vector([0, 1, 0, 0]), '0.5fh')
    '<1.00000, 1.57080, 0.00000, 0.00000>'
"""

from array import array
import reprlib
import math
import numbers
import functools
import operator
import itertools

class Vector:
    typecode = 'd'

    def __init__(self, components):
        self._components = array(self.typecode, components)

    def __iter__(self):
        return iter(self._components)

    def __repr__(self):
        components = reprlib.repr(self._components)
        components = components[components.find('['):-1]
        return 'Vector({})'.format(components)

    def __str__(self):
        return str(tuple(self))

    def __bytes__(self):
        return (bytes([ord(self.typecode)]) +
                bytes(self._components))

    def __eq__(self, other):
        return (len(self) == len(other) and
                all(a == b for a, b in zip(self, other)))

    def __hash__(self):
        hashes = (hash(x) for x in self)
        return functools.reduce(operator.xor, hashes, 0)

    def __abs__(self):
        return math.sqrt(sum(x * x for x in self))

    def __bool__(self):
        return bool(abs(self))

    def __len__(self):
        return len(self._components)

    def __getitem__(self, index):
        cls = type(self)
        if isinstance(index, slice):
            return cls(self._components[index])
        elif isinstance(index, numbers.Integral):
            return self._components[index]
        else:
            msg = '{.__name__} indices must be integers'
            raise TypeError(msg.format(cls))

    shortcut_names = 'xyzt'

    def __getattr__(self, name):
        cls = type(self)
        if len(name) == 1:
            pos = cls.shortcut_names.find(name)
            if 0 <= pos < len(self._components):
                return self._components[pos]
        msg = '{.__name__!r} object has no attribute {!r}'
        raise AttributeError(msg.format(cls, name))

    def angle(self, n):
        r = math.sqrt(sum(x * x for x in self[n:]))
        a = math.atan2(r, self[n-1])
        if (n == len(self) - 1) and (self[-1] < 0):
            return math.pi * 2 - a
        else:
            return a

    def angles(self):
        return (self.angle(n) for n in range(1, len(self)))

    def __format__(self, fmt_spec=''):
        if fmt_spec.endswith('h'):  # hyperspherical coordinates
            fmt_spec = fmt_spec[:-1]
            coords = itertools.chain([abs(self)],
                                     self.angles())
            outer_fmt = '<{}>'
        else:
            coords = self
            outer_fmt = '({})'
        components = (format(c, fmt_spec) for c in coords)
        return outer_fmt.format(', '.join(components))

    @classmethod
    def frombytes(cls, octets):
        typecode = chr(octets[0])
        memv = memoryview(octets[1:]).cast(typecode)
        return cls(memv)

Import itertools to use chain function in __format__.

Compute one of the angular coordinates, using formulas adapted from the n-sphere article.

Create generator expression to compute all angular coordinates on demand.

Use itertools.chain to produce genexp to iterate seamlessly over the magnitude and the angular coordinates.

Configure spherical coordinate display with angular brackets.

Configure Cartesian coordinate display with parentheses.

Create generator expression to format each coordinate item on demand.

Plug formatted components separated by commas inside brackets or parentheses.

Note

We are making heavy use of generator expressions in __format__, angle, and angles but our focus here is in providing __format__ to bring Vector to the same implementation level as Vector2d. When we cover generators in Chapter 14 we’ll use some of the code in Vector as examples, and then the generator tricks will be explained in detail.

This concludes our mission for this chapter. The Vector class will be enhanced with infix operators in Chapter 13, but our goal here was to explore techniques for coding special methods that are useful in a wide variety of collection classes.

Chapter Summary

The Vector example in this chapter was designed to be compatible with Vector2d, except for the use of a different constructor signature accepting a single iterable argument, just like the built-in sequence types do. The fact that Vector behaves as a sequence just by implementing __getitem__ and __len__ prompted a discussion of protocols, the informal interfaces used in duck-typed languages.

We then looked at how the my_seq[a:b:c] syntax works behind the scenes, by creating a slice(a, b, c) object and handing it to __getitem__. Armed with this knowledge, we made Vector respond correctly to slicing, by returning new Vector instances, just like a Pythonic sequence is expected to do.

The next step was to provide read-only access to the first few Vector components using notation such as my_vec.x. We did it by implementing __getattr__. Doing that opened the possibility of tempting the user to assign to those special components by writing my_vec.x = 7, revealing a potential bug. We fixed it by implementing __setattr__ as well, to forbid assigning values to single-letter attributes. Very often, when you code a __getattr__ you need to add __setattr__ too, in order to avoid inconsistent behavior.

Implementing the __hash__ function provided the perfect context for using functools.reduce, because we needed to apply the xor operator ^ in succession to the hashes of all Vector components to produce an aggregate hash value for the whole Vector. After applying reduce in __hash__, we used the all reducing built-in to create a more efficient __eq__ method.

The last enhancement to Vector was to reimplement the __format__ method from Vector2d by supporting spherical coordinates as an alternative to the default Cartesian coordinates. We used quite a bit of math and several generators to code __format__ and its auxiliary functions, but these are implementation details—and we’ll come back to the generators in Chapter 14. The goal of that last section was to support a custom format, thus fulfilling the promise of a Vector that could do everything a Vector2d did, and more.

As we did in Chapter 9, here we often looked at how standard Python objects behave, to emulate them and provide a “Pythonic” look-and-feel to Vector.

In Chapter 13, we will implement several infix operators on Vector. The math will be much simpler than that in the angle() method here, but exploring how infix operators work in Python is a great lesson in OO design. But before we get to operator overloading, we’ll step back from working on one class and look at organizing multiple classes with interfaces and inheritance, the subjects of Chapters 11 and 12.

Further Reading

Most special methods covered in the Vector example also appear in the Vector2d example from Chapter 9, so the references in “Further Reading” are all relevant here.

The powerful reduce higher-order function is also known as fold, accumulate, aggregate, compress, and inject. For more information, see Wikipedia’s “Fold (higher-order function)” article, which presents applications of that higher-order function with emphasis on functional programming with recursive data structures. The article also includes a table listing fold-like functions in dozens of programming languages.

Soapbox

Protocols as Informal Interfaces

Protocols are not an invention of Python. The Smalltalk team, who also coined the expression “object oriented,” used “protocol” as a synonym for what we now call interfaces. Some Smalltalk programming environments allowed programmers to tag a group of methods as a protocol, but that was merely a documentation and navigation aid, and not enforced by the language. That’s why I believe “informal interface” is a reasonable short explanation for “protocol” when I speak to an audience that is more familiar with formal (and compiler enforced) interfaces.

Established protocols naturally evolve in any language that uses dynamic typing, that is, when type-checking done at runtime because there is no static type information in method signatures and variables. Ruby is another important OO language that has dynamic typing and uses protocols.

In the Python documentation, you can often tell when a protocol is being discussed when you see language like “a file-like object.” This is a quick way of saying “something that behaves sufficiently like a file, by implementing the parts of the file interface that are relevant in the context.”

You may think that implementing only part of a protocol is sloppy, but it has the advantage of keeping things simple. Section 3.3 of the “Data Model” chapter suggests:

When implementing a class that emulates any built-in type, it is important that the emulation only be implemented to the degree that it makes sense for the object being modeled. For example, some sequences may work well with retrieval of individual elements, but extracting a slice may not make sense.

Data Model, chapter of The Python Language Reference

When we don’t need to code nonsense methods just to fulfill some over-designed interface contract and keep the compiler happy, it becomes easier to follow the KISS principle.

I’ll have more to say about protocols and interfaces in Chapter 11, where that is actually the main focus.

Origins of Duck Typing

I believe the Ruby community, more than any other, helped popularize the term “duck typing,” as they preached to the Java masses. But the expression has been used in Python discussions before either Ruby or Python were “popular.” According to Wikipedia, an early example of the duck analogy in object-oriented programming is a message to the Python-list by Alex Martelli from July 26, 2000: polymorphism (was Re: Type checking in python?). That’s where the quote at the beginning of this chapter came from. If you are curious about the literary origins of the “duck typing” term, and the applications of this OO concept in many languages, check out Wikipedia’s “Duck typing” entry.

A safe format, with Enhanced Usability

While implementing __format__, we did not take any precautions regarding Vector instances with a very large number of components, as we did in __repr__ using reprlib. The reasoning is that repr() is for debugging and logging, so it must always generate some serviceable output, while __format__ is used to display output to end users who presumably want to see the entire Vector. If you think this is dangerous, then it would be cool to implement a further extension to the format specifier mini-language.

Here is how I’d do it: by default, any formatted Vector would display a reasonable but limited number of components, say 30. If there are more elements than that, the default behavior would be similar to what the reprlib does: chop the excess and put ... in its place. However, if the format specifier ended with the special * code, meaning “all,” then the size limitation would be disabled. So a user who’s unaware of the problem of very long displays will not be bitten by it by accident. But if the default limitation becomes a nuisance, then the presence of the ... should prompt the user to research the documentation and discover the * formatting code.

Send a pull request to the Fluent Python repository on GitHub if you implement this!

The Search for a Pythonic Sum

There’s no single answer to “What is Pythonic?” just as there’s no single answer to “What is beautiful?” Saying, as I often do, that it means using “idiomatic Python” is not 100% satisfactory, because what may be “idiomatic” for you may not be for me. One thing I know: “idiomatic” does not mean using the most obscure language features.

In the Python-list, there’s a thread from April 2003 titled “Pythonic Way to Sum n-th List Element?”. It’s relevant to our discussion of reduce in this chapter.

The original poster, Guy Middleton, asked for an improvement on this solution, stating he did not like to use lambda:⁷

>>> my_list = [[1, 2, 3], [40, 50, 60], [9, 8, 7]]
>>> import functools
>>> functools.reduce(lambda a, b: a+b, [sub[1] for sub in my_list])
60

That code uses lots of idioms: lambda, reduce, and a list comprehension. It would probably come last in a popularity contest, because it offends people who hate lambda and those who despise list comprehensions—pretty much both sides of a divide.

If you’re going to use lambda, there’s probably no reason to use a list comprehension—except for filtering, which is not the case here.

Here is a solution of my own that will please the lambda lovers:

>>> functools.reduce(lambda a, b: a + b[1], my_list, 0)
60

I did not take part in the original thread, and I wouldn’t use that in real code, because I don’t like lambda too much myself, but I wanted to show an example without a list comprehension.

The first answer came from Fernando Perez, creator of IPython, highlighting that NumPy supports n-dimensional arrays and n-dimensional slicing:

>>> import numpy as np
>>> my_array = np.array(my_list)
>>> np.sum(my_array[:, 1])
60

I think Perez’s solution is cool, but Guy Middleton praised this next solution, by Paul Rubin and Skip Montanaro:

>>> import operator
>>> functools.reduce(operator.add, [sub[1] for sub in my_list], 0)
60

Then Evan Simpson asked, “What’s wrong with this?”:

>>> total = 0
>>> for sub in my_list:
...     total += sub[1]
...
>>> total
60

Lots of people agreed that was quite Pythonic. Alex Martelli went as far as saying that’s probably how Guido would code it.

I like Evan Simpson’s code but I also like David Eppstein’s comment on it:

If you want the sum of a list of items, you should write it in a way that looks like “the sum of a list of items”, not in a way that looks like “loop over these items, maintain another variable t, perform a sequence of additions”. Why do we have high level languages if not to express our intentions at a higher level and let the language worry about what low-level operations are needed to implement it?

Then Alex Martelli comes back to suggest:

“The sum” is so frequently needed that I wouldn’t mind at all if Python singled it out as a built-in. But “reduce(operator.add, …” just isn’t a great way to express it, in my opinion (and yet as an old APL’er, and FP-liker, I should like it—but I don’t).

Alex goes on to suggest a sum() function, which he contributed. It became a built-in in Python 2.3, released only three months after that conversation took place. So Alex’s preferred syntax became the norm:

>>> sum([sub[1] for sub in my_list])
60

By the end of the next year (November 2004), Python 2.4 was launched with generator expressions, providing what is now in my opinion the most Pythonic answer to Guy Middleton’s original question:

>>> sum(sub[1] for sub in my_list)
60

This is not only more readable than reduce but also avoids the trap of the empty sequence: sum([]) is 0, simple as that.

In the same conversation, Alex Martelli suggests the reduce built-in in Python 2 was more trouble than it was worth, because it encouraged coding idioms that were hard to explain. He was most convincing: the function was demoted to the functools module in Python 3.

Still, functools.reduce has its place. It solved the problem of our Vector.__hash__ in a way that I would call Pythonic.

¹ The iter() function is covered in Chapter 14, along with the __iter__ method.

² Attribute lookup is more complicated than this; we’ll see the gory details in Part VI. For now, this simplified explanation will do.

³ The sum, any, and all cover the most common uses of reduce. See the discussion in “Modern Replacements for map, filter, and reduce”.

⁴ We’ll seriously consider the matter of Vector([1, 2]) == (1, 2) in “Operator Overloading 101”.

⁵ That’s surprising (to me, at least). I think zip should raise ValueError if the sequences are not all of the same length, which is what happens when unpacking an iterable to a tuple of variables of different length.

⁶ The Wolfram Mathworld site has an article on Hypersphere; on Wikipedia, “hypersphere” redirects to the "n-sphere” entry.

⁷ I adapted the code for this presentation: in 2003, reduce was a built-in, but in Python 3 we need to import it; also, I replaced the names x and y with my_list and sub, for sub-list.

Chapter 11. Interfaces: From Protocols to ABCs

An abstract class represents an interface.¹

Bjarne Stroustrup, Creator of C++

Interfaces are the subject of this chapter: from the dynamic protocols that are the hallmark of duck typing to abstract base classes (ABCs) that make interfaces explicit and verify implementations for conformance.

If you have a Java, C#, or similar background, the novelty here is in the informal protocols of duck typing. But for the long-time Pythonista or Rubyist, that is the “normal” way of thinking about interfaces, and the news is the formality and type-checking of ABCs. The language was 15 years old when ABCs were introduced in Python 2.6.

We’ll start the chapter by reviewing how the Python community traditionally understood interfaces as somewhat loose—in the sense that a partially implemented interface is often acceptable. We’ll make that clear through a couple examples that highlight the dynamic nature of duck typing.

Then, a guest essay by Alex Martelli will introduce ABCs and give name to a new trend in Python programming. The rest of the chapter will be devoted to ABCs, starting with their common use as superclasses when you need to implement an interface. We’ll then see when an ABC checks concrete subclasses for conformance to the interface it defines, and how a registration mechanism lets developers declare that a class implements an interface without subclassing. Finally, we’ll see how an ABC can be programmed to automatically “recognize” arbitrary classes that conform to its interface—without subclassing or explicit registration.

We will implement a new ABC to see how that works, but Alex Martelli and I don’t want to encourage you to start writing your own ABCs left and right. The risk of over-engineering with ABCs is very high.

Warning

ABCs, like descriptors and metaclasses, are tools for building frameworks. Therefore, only a very small minority of Python developers can create ABCs without imposing unreasonable limitations and needless work on fellow programmers.

Let’s get started with the Pythonic view of interfaces.

Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture

Python was already highly successful before ABCs were introduced, and most existing code does not use them at all. Since Chapter 1, we’ve been talking about duck typing and protocols. In “Protocols and Duck Typing”, protocols are defined as the informal interfaces that make polymorphism work in languages with dynamic typing like Python.

How do interfaces work in a dynamic-typed language? First, the basics: even without an interface keyword in the language, and regardless of ABCs, every class has an interface: the set public attributes (methods or data attributes) implemented or inherited by the class. This includes special methods, like __getitem__ or __add__.

By definition, protected and private attributes are not part of an interface, even if “protected” is merely a naming convention (the single leading underscore) and private attributes are easily accessed (recall “Private and “Protected” Attributes in Python”). It is bad form to violate these conventions.

On the other hand, it’s not a sin to have public data attributes as part of the interface of an object, because—if necessary—a data attribute can always be turned into a property implementing getter/setter logic without breaking client code that uses the plain obj.attr syntax. We did that in the Vector2d class: in Example 11-1, we see the first implementation with public x and y attributes.

Example 11-1. vector2d_v0.py: x and y are public data attributes (same code as Example 9-2)

class Vector2d:
    typecode = 'd'

    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self.x = float(x)
        self.y = float(y)

    def __iter__(self):
        return (i for i in (self.x, self.y))

    # more methods follow (omitted in this listing)

In Example 9-7, we turned x and y into read-only properties (Example 11-2). This is a significant refactoring, but an essential part of the interface of Vector2d is unchanged: users can still read my_vector.x and my_vector.y.

Example 11-2. vector2d_v3.py: x and y reimplemented as properties (see full listing in Example 9-9)

class Vector2d:
    typecode = 'd'

    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self.__x = float(x)
        self.__y = float(y)

    @property
    def x(self):
        return self.__x

    @property
    def y(self):
        return self.__y

    def __iter__(self):
        return (i for i in (self.x, self.y))

    # more methods follow (omitted in this listing)

A useful complementary definition of interface is: the subset of an object’s public methods that enable it to play a specific role in the system. That’s what is implied when the Python documentation mentions “a file-like object” or “an iterable,” without specifying a class. An interface seen as a set of methods to fulfill a role is what Smalltalkers called a procotol, and the term spread to other dynamic language communities. Protocols are independent of inheritance. A class may implement several protocols, enabling its instances to fulfill several roles.

Protocols are interfaces, but because they are informal—defined only by documentation and conventions—protocols cannot be enforced like formal interfaces can (we’ll see how ABCs enforce interface conformance later in this chapter). A protocol may be partially implemented in a particular class, and that’s OK. Sometimes all a specific API requires from “a file-like object” is that it has a .read() method that returns bytes. The remaining file methods may or may not be relevant in the context.

As I write this, the Python 3 documentation of memoryview says that it works with objects that “support the buffer protocol, which is only documented at the C API level. The bytearray constructor accepts an “an object conforming to the buffer interface.” Now there is a move to adopt “bytes-like object” as a friendlier term.² I point this out to emphasize that “X-like object,” “X protocol,” and “X interface” are synonyms in the minds of Pythonistas.

One of the most fundamental interfaces in Python is the sequence protocol. The interpreter goes out of its way to handle objects that provide even a minimal implementation of that protocol, as the next section demonstrates.

Python Digs Sequences

The philosophy of the Python data model is to cooperate with essential protocols as much as possible. When it comes to sequences, Python tries hard to work with even the simplest implementations.

Figure 11-1 shows how the formal Sequence interface is defined as an ABC.

Figure 11-1. UML class diagram for the Sequence ABC and related abstract classes from collections.abc. Inheritance arrows point from subclass to its superclasses. Names in italic are abstract methods.

Now, take a look at the Foo class in Example 11-3. It does not inherit from abc.Sequence, and it only implements one method of the sequence protocol: __getitem__ (__len__ is missing).

Example 11-3. Partial sequence protocol implementation with __getitem__: enough for item access, iteration, and the in operator

>>> class Foo:
...     def __getitem__(self, pos):
...         return range(0, 30, 10)[pos]
...
>>> f[1]
10
>>> f = Foo()
>>> for i in f: print(i)
...
0
10
20
>>> 20 in f
True
>>> 15 in f
False

There is no method __iter__ yet Foo instances are iterable because—as a fallback—when Python sees a __getitem__ method, it tries to iterate over the object by calling that method with integer indexes starting with 0. Because Python is smart enough to iterate over Foo instances, it can also make the in operator work even if Foo has no __contains__ method: it does a full scan to check if an item is present.

In summary, given the importance of the sequence protocol, in the absence __iter__ and __contains__ Python still manages to make iteration and the in operator work by invoking __getitem__.

Our original FrenchDeck from Chapter 1 does not subclass from abc.Sequence either, but it does implement both methods of the sequence protocol: __getitem__ and __len__. See Example 11-4.

Example 11-4. A deck as a sequence of cards (same as Example 1-1)

import collections

Card = collections.namedtuple('Card', ['rank', 'suit'])

class FrenchDeck:
    ranks = [str(n) for n in range(2, 11)] + list('JQKA')
    suits = 'spades diamonds clubs hearts'.split()

    def __init__(self):
        self._cards = [Card(rank, suit) for suit in self.suits
                                        for rank in self.ranks]

    def __len__(self):
        return len(self._cards)

    def __getitem__(self, position):
        return self._cards[position]

A good part of the demos in Chapter 1 work because of the special treatment Python gives to anything vaguely resembling a sequence. Iteration in Python represents an extreme form of duck typing: the interpreter tries two different methods to iterate over objects.

Now let’s study another example emphasizing the dynamic nature of protocols.

Monkey-Patching to Implement a Protocol at Runtime

The FrenchDeck class from Example 11-4 has a major flaw: it cannot be shuffled. Years ago when I first wrote the FrenchDeck example I did implement a shuffle method. Later I had a Pythonic insight: if a FrenchDeck acts like a sequence, then it doesn’t need its own shuffle method because there is already random.shuffle, documented as “Shuffle the sequence x in place.”

Tip

When you follow established protocols, you improve your chances of leveraging existing standard library and third-party code, thanks to duck typing.

The standard random.shuffle function is used like this:

>>> from random import shuffle
>>> l = list(range(10))
>>> shuffle(l)
>>> l
[5, 2, 9, 7, 8, 3, 1, 4, 0, 6]

However, if we try to shuffle a FrenchDeck instance, we get an exception, as in Example 11-5.

Example 11-5. random.shuffle cannot handle FrenchDeck

>>> from random import shuffle
>>> from frenchdeck import FrenchDeck
>>> deck = FrenchDeck()
>>> shuffle(deck)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File ".../python3.3/random.py", line 265, in shuffle
    x[i], x[j] = x[j], x[i]
TypeError: 'FrenchDeck' object does not support item assignment

The error message is quite clear: “'FrenchDeck' object does not support item assignment.” The problem is that shuffle operates by swapping items inside the collection, and FrenchDeck only implements the immutable sequence protocol. Mutable sequences must also provide a __setitem__ method.

Because Python is dynamic, we can fix this at runtime, even at the interactive console. Example 11-6 shows how to do it.

Example 11-6. Monkey patching FrenchDeck to make it mutable and compatible with random.shuffle (continuing from Example 11-5)

>>> def set_card(deck, position, card):
...     deck._cards[position] = card
...
>>> FrenchDeck.__setitem__ = set_card
>>> shuffle(deck)
>>> deck[:5]
[Card(rank='3', suit='hearts'), Card(rank='4', suit='diamonds'), Card(rank='4',
suit='clubs'), Card(rank='7', suit='hearts'), Card(rank='9', suit='spades')]

Create a function that takes deck, position, and card as arguments.

Assign that function to an attribute named __setitem__ in the FrenchDeck class.

deck can now be sorted because FrenchDeck now implements the necessary method of the mutable sequence protocol.

The signature of the __setitem__ special method is defined in The Python Language Reference in “3.3.6. Emulating container types”. Here we named the arguments deck, position, card—and not self, key, value as in the language reference—to show that every Python method starts life as a plain function, and naming the first argument self is merely a convention. This is OK in a console session, but in a Python source file it’s much better to use self, key, and value as documented.

The trick is that set_card knows that the deck object has an attribute named _cards, and _cards must be a mutable sequence. The set_card function is then attached to the FrenchDeck class as the __setitem__ special method. This is an example of monkey patching: changing a class or module at runtime, without touching the source code. Monkey patching is powerful, but the code that does the actual patching is very tightly coupled with the program to be patched, often handling private and undocumented parts.

Besides being an example of monkey patching, Example 11-6 highlights that protocols are dynamic: random.shuffle doesn’t care what type of argument it gets, it only needs the object to implement part of the mutable sequence protocol. It doesn’t even matter if the object was “born” with the necessary methods or if they were somehow acquired later.

The theme of this chapter so far has been “duck typing”: operating with objects regardless of their types, as long as they implement certain protocols.

When we did present diagrams with ABCs, the intent was to show how the protocols are related to the explicit interfaces documented in the abstract classes, but we did not actually inherit from any ABC so far.

In the following sections, we will leverage ABCs directly, and not just as documentation.

Alex Martelli’s Waterfowl

After reviewing the usual protocol-style interfaces of Python, we move to ABCs. But before diving into examples and details, Alex Martelli explains in a guest essay why ABCs were a great addition to Python.

Note

I am very grateful to Alex Martelli. He was already the most cited person in this book before he became one of the technical editors. His insights have been invaluable, and then he offered to write this essay. We are incredibly lucky to have him. Take it away, Alex!

Waterfowl and ABCs

By Alex Martelli

I’ve been credited on Wikipedia for helping spread the helpful meme and sound-bite “duck typing” (i.e, ignoring an object’s actual type, focusing instead on ensuring that the object implements the method names, signatures, and semantics required for its intended use).

In Python, this mostly boils down to avoiding the use of isinstance to check the object’s type (not to mention the even worse approach of checking, for example, whether type(foo) is bar—which is rightly anathema as it inhibits even the simplest forms of inheritance!).

The overall duck typing approach remains quite useful in many contexts—and yet, in many others, an often preferable one has evolved over time. And herein lies a tale…

In recent generations, the taxonomy of genus and species (including but not limited to the family of waterfowl known as Anatidae) has mostly been driven by phenetics—an approach focused on similarities of morphology and behavior… chiefly, observable traits. The analogy to “duck typing” was strong.

However, parallel evolution can often produce similar traits, both morphological and behavioral ones, among species that are actually unrelated, but just happened to evolve in similar, though separate, ecological niches. Similar “accidental similarities” happen in programming, too—for example, consider the classic OOP example:

class Artist:
    def draw(self): ...

class Gunslinger:
    def draw(self): ...

class Lottery:
    def draw(self): ...

Clearly, the mere existence of a method called draw, callable without arguments, is far from sufficient to assure us that two objects x and y such that x.draw() and y.draw() can be called are in any way exchangeable or abstractly equivalent—nothing about the similarity of the semantics resulting from such calls can be inferred. Rather, we need a knowledgeable programmer to somehow positively assert that such an equivalence holds at some level!

In biology (and other disciplines) this issue has led to the emergence (and, on many facets, the dominance) of an approach that’s an alternative to phenetics, known as cladistics—focusing taxonomical choices on characteristics that are inherited from common ancestors, rather than ones that are independently evolved. (Cheap and rapid DNA sequencing can make cladistics highly practical in many more cases, in recent years.)

For example, sheldgeese (once classified as being closer to other geese) and shelducks (once classified as being closer to other ducks) are now grouped together within the subfamily Tadornidae (implying they’re closer to each other than to any other Anatidae, as they share a closer common ancestor). Furthermore, DNA analysis has shown, in particular, that the white-winged wood duck is not as close to the Muscovy duck (the latter being a shelduck) as similarity in looks and behavior had long suggested—so the wood duck was reclassified into its own genus, and entirely out of the subfamily!

Does this matter? It depends on the context! For such purposes as deciding how best to cook a waterfowl once you’ve bagged it, for example, specific observable traits (not all of them—plumage, for example, is de minimis in such a context), mostly texture and flavor (old-fashioned phenetics!), may be far more relevant than cladistics. But for other issues, such as susceptibility to different pathogens (whether you’re trying to raise waterfowl in captivity, or preserve them in the wild), DNA closeness can matter much more…

So, by very loose analogy with these taxonomic revolutions in the world of waterfowls, I’m recommending supplementing (not entirely replacing—in certain contexts it shall still serve) good old duck typing with… goose typing!

What goose typing means is: isinstance(obj, cls) is now just fine… as long as cls is an abstract base class—in other words, cls’s metaclass is abc.ABCMeta.

You can find many useful existing abstract classes in collections.abc (and additional ones in the numbers module of The Python Standard Library).³

Among the many conceptual advantages of ABCs over concrete classes (e.g., Scott Meyer’s “all non-leaf classes should be abstract”—see Item 33 in his book, More Effective C++), Python’s ABCs add one major practical advantage: the register class method, which lets end-user code “declare” that a certain class becomes a “virtual” subclass of an ABC (for this purpose the registered class must meet the ABC’s method name and signature requirements, and more importantly the underlying semantic contract—but it need not have been developed with any awareness of the ABC, and in particular need not inherit from it!). This goes a long way toward breaking the rigidity and strong coupling that make inheritance something to use with much more caution than typically practiced by most OOP programmers…

Sometimes you don’t even need to register a class for an ABC to recognize it as a subclass!

That’s the case for the ABCs whose essence boils down to a few special methods. For example:

>>> class Struggle:
...     def __len__(self): return 23
...
>>> from collections import abc
>>> isinstance(Struggle(), abc.Sized)
True

As you see, abc.Sized recognizes Struggle as “a subclass,” with no need for registration, as implementing the special method named __len__ is all it takes (it’s supposed to be implemented with the proper syntax—callable without arguments—and semantics—returning a nonnegative integer denoting an object’s “length”; any code that implements a specially named method, such as __len__, with arbitrary, non-compliant syntax and semantics has much worse problems anyway).

So, here’s my valediction: whenever you’re implementing a class embodying any of the concepts represented in the ABCs in numbers, collections.abc, or other framework you may be using, be sure (if needed) to subclass it from, or register it into, the corresponding ABC. At the start of your programs using some library or framework defining classes which have omitted to do that, perform the registrations yourself; then, when you must check for (most typically) an argument being, e.g, “a sequence,” check whether:

isinstance(the_arg, collections.abc.Sequence)

And, don’t define custom ABCs (or metaclasses) in production code… if you feel the urge to do so, I’d bet it’s likely to be a case of “all problems look like a nail”-syndrome for somebody who just got a shiny new hammer—you (and future maintainers of your code) will be much happier sticking with straightforward and simple code, eschewing such depths. Valē!

Besides coining the “goose typing,” Alex makes the point that inheriting from an ABC is more than implementing the required methods: it’s also a clear declaration of intent by the developer. That intent can also be made explicit through registering a virtual subclass.

In addition, the use of isinstance and issubclass becomes more acceptable to test against ABCs. In the past, these functions worked against duck typing, but with ABCs they become more flexible. After all, if a component does not implement an ABC by subclassing, it can always be registered after the fact so it passes those explicit type checks.

However, even with ABCs, you should beware that excessive use of isinstance checks may be a code smell—a symptom of bad OO design. It’s usually not OK to have a chain of if/elif/elif with insinstance checks performing different actions depending on the type of an object: you should be using polymorphism for that—i.e., designing your classes so that the interpreter dispatches calls to the proper methods, instead of you hardcoding the dispatch logic in if/elif/elif blocks.

Tip

There is a common, practical exception to the preceding recommendation: some Python APIs accept a single str or a sequence of str items; if it’s just a single str, you want to wrap it in a list, to ease processing. Because str is a sequence type, the simplest way to distinguish it from any other immutable sequence is to do an explicit isinstance(x, str) check.⁴

On the other hand, it’s usually OK to perform an insinstance check against an ABC if you must enforce an API contract: “Dude, you have to implement this if you want to call me,” as technical reviewer Lennart Regebro put it. That’s particularly useful in systems that have a plug-in architecture. Outside of frameworks, duck typing is often simpler and more flexible than type checks.

For example, in several classes in this book, when I needed to take a sequence of items and process them as a list, instead of requiring a list argument by type checking, I simply took the argument and immediately built a list from it: that way I can accept any iterable, and if the argument is not iterable, the call will fail soon enough with a very clear message. One example of this code pattern is in the __init__ method in Example 11-13, later in this chapter. Of course, this approach wouldn’t work if the sequence argument shouldn’t be copied, either because it’s too large or because my code needs to change it in place. Then an insinstance(x, abc.MutableSequence) would be better. If any iterable is acceptable, then calling iter(x) to obtain an iterator would be the way to go, as we’ll see in “Why Sequences Are Iterable: The iter Function”.

Another example is how you might imitate the handling of the field_names argument in collections.namedtuple: field_names accepts a single string with identifiers separated by spaces or commas, or a sequence of identifiers. It might be tempting to use isinstance, but Example 11-7 shows how I’d do it using duck typing.⁵

Example 11-7. Duck typing to handle a string or an iterable of strings

    try:
        field_names = field_names.replace(',', ' ').split()
    except AttributeError:
        pass
    field_names = tuple(field_names)

Assume it’s a string (EAFP = it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission).

Convert commas to spaces and split the result into a list of names.

Sorry, field_names doesn’t quack like a str… there’s either no .replace, or it returns something we can’t .split.

Now we assume it’s already an iterable of names.

To make sure it’s an iterable and to keep our own copy, create a tuple out of what we have.

Finally, in his essay, Alex reinforces more than once the need for restraint in the creation of ABCs. An ABC epidemic would be disastrous, imposing excessive ceremony in a language that became popular because it’s practical and pragmatic. During the Fluent Python review process, Alex wrote:

ABCs are meant to encapsulate very general concepts, abstractions, introduced by a framework—things like “a sequence” and “an exact number.” [Readers] most likely don’t need to write any new ABCs, just use existing ones correctly, to get 99.9% of the benefits without serious risk of misdesign.

Now let’s see goose typing in practice.

Subclassing an ABC

Following Martelli’s advice, we’ll leverage an existing ABC, collections.MutableSequence, before daring to invent our own. In Example 11-8, FrenchDeck2 is explicitly declared a subclass of collections.MutableSequence.

Example 11-8. frenchdeck2.py: FrenchDeck2, a subclass of collections.MutableSequence

import collections

Card = collections.namedtuple('Card', ['rank', 'suit'])

class FrenchDeck2(collections.MutableSequence):
    ranks = [str(n) for n in range(2, 11)] + list('JQKA')
    suits = 'spades diamonds clubs hearts'.split()

    def __init__(self):
        self._cards = [Card(rank, suit) for suit in self.suits
                                        for rank in self.ranks]

    def __len__(self):
        return len(self._cards)

    def __getitem__(self, position):
        return self._cards[position]

    def __setitem__(self, position, value):
        self._cards[position] = value

    def __delitem__(self, position):
        del self._cards[position]

    def insert(self, position, value):
        self._cards.insert(position, value)

__setitem__ is all we need to enable shuffling…

But subclassing MutableSequence forces us to implement __delitem__, an abstract method of that ABC.

We are also required to implement insert, the third abstract method of MutableSequence.

Python does not check for the implementation of the abstract methods at import time (when the frenchdeck2.py module is loaded and compiled), but only at runtime when we actually try to instantiate FrenchDeck2. Then, if we fail to implement any abstract method, we get a TypeError exception with a message such as "Can't instantiate abstract class FrenchDeck2 with abstract methods __delitem__, insert". That’s why we must implement __delitem__ and insert, even if our FrenchDeck2 examples do not need those behaviors: the MutableSequence ABC demands them.

As Figure 11-2 shows, not all methods of the Sequence and MutableSequence ABCs are abstract.

Figure 11-2. UML class diagram for the MutableSequence ABC and its superclasses from collections.abc (inheritance arrows point from subclasses to ancestors; names in italic are abstract classes and abstract methods)

From Sequence, FrenchDeck2 inherits the following ready-to-use concrete methods: __contains__, __iter__, __reversed__, index, and count. From MutableSequence, it gets append, reverse, extend, pop, remove, and __iadd__.

The concrete methods in each collections.abc ABC are implemented in terms of the public interface of the class, so they work without any knowledge of the internal structure of instances.

Tip

As the coder of a concrete subclass, you may be able to override methods inherited from ABCs with more efficient implementations. For example, __contains__ works by doing a full scan of the sequence, but if your concrete sequence keeps its items sorted, you can write a faster __contains__ that does a binary search using bisect function (see “Managing Ordered Sequences with bisect”).

To use ABCs well, you need to know what’s available. We’ll review the collections ABCs next.

ABCs in the Standard Library

Since Python 2.6, ABCs are available in the standard library. Most are defined in the collections.abc module, but there are others. You can find ABCs in the numbers and io packages, for example. But the most widely used is collections.abc. Let’s see what is available there.

ABCs in collections.abc

Tip

There are two modules named abc in the standard library. Here we are talking about collections.abc. To reduce loading time, in Python 3.4, it’s implemented outside of the collections package, in Lib/_collections_abc.py), so it’s imported separately from collections. The other abc module is just abc (i.e., Lib/abc.py) where the abc.ABC class is defined. Every ABC depends on it, but we don’t need to import it ourselves except to create a new ABC.

Figure 11-3 is a summary UML class diagram (without attribute names) of all 16 ABCs defined in collections.abc as of Python 3.4. The official documentation of collections.abc has a nice table summarizing the ABCs, their relationships, and their abstract and concrete methods (called “mixin methods”). There is plenty of multiple inheritance going on in Figure 11-3. We’ll devote most of Chapter 12 to multiple inheritance, but for now it’s enough to say that it is usually not a problem when ABCs are concerned.⁶

Figure 11-3. UML class diagram for ABCs in collections.abc

Let’s review the clusters in Figure 11-3:

Iterable, Container, and Sized

Every collection should either inherit from these ABCs or at least implement compatible protocols. Iterable supports iteration with __iter__, Container supports the in operator with __contains__, and Sized supports len() with __len__.

Sequence, Mapping, and Set

These are the main immutable collection types, and each has a mutable subclass. A detailed diagram for MutableSequence is in Figure 11-2; for MutableMapping and MutableSet, there are diagrams in Chapter 3 (Figures 3-1 and 3-2).

MappingView

In Python 3, the objects returned from the mapping methods .items(), .keys(), and .values() inherit from ItemsView, ValuesView, and ValuesView, respectively. The first two also inherit the rich interface of Set, with all the operators we saw in “Set Operations”.

Callable and Hashable

These ABCs are not so closely related to collections, but collections.abc was the first package to define ABCs in the standard library, and these two were deemed important enough to be included. I’ve never seen subclasses of either Callable or Hashable. Their main use is to support the insinstance built-in as a safe way of determining whether an object is callable or hashable.⁷

Iterator

Note that iterator subclasses Iterable. We discuss this further in Chapter 14.

After the collections.abc package, the most useful package of ABCs in the standard library is numbers, covered next.

The Numbers Tower of ABCs

The numbers package defines the so-called “numerical tower” (i.e., this linear hierarchy of ABCs), where Number is the topmost superclass, Complex is its immediate subclass, and so on, down to Integral:

Number

Complex

Real

Rational

Integral

So if you need to check for an integer, use isinstance(x, numbers.Integral) to accept int, bool (which subclasses int) or other integer types that may be provided by external libraries that register their types with the numbers ABCs. And to satisfy your check, you or the users of your API may always register any compatible type as a virtual subclass of numbers.Integral.

If, on the other hand, a value can be a floating-point type, you write isinstance(x, numbers.Real), and your code will happily take bool, int, float, fractions.Fraction, or any other noncomplex numerical type provided by an external library, such as NumPy, which is suitably registered.

Warning

Somewhat surprisingly, decimal.Decimal is not registered as a virtual subclass of numbers.Real. The reason is that, if you need the precision of Decimal in your program, then you want to be protected from accidental mixing of decimals with other less precise numeric types, particularly floats.

After looking at some existing ABCs, let’s practice goose typing by implementing an ABC from scratch and putting it to use. The goal here is not to encourage everyone to start coding ABCs left and right, but to learn how to read the source code of the ABCs you’ll find in the standard library and other packages.

Defining and Using an ABC

To justify creating an ABC, we need to come up with a context for using it as an extension point in a framework. So here is our context: imagine you need to display advertisements on a website or a mobile app in random order, but without repeating an ad before the full inventory of ads is shown. Now let’s assume we are building an ad management framework called ADAM. One of its requirements is to support user-provided nonrepeating random-picking classes.⁸ To make it clear to ADAM users what is expected of a “nonrepeating random-picking” component, we’ll define an ABC.

Taking a clue from “stack” and “queue” (which describe abstract interfaces in terms of physical arrangements of objects), I will use a real-world metaphor to name our ABC: bingo cages and lottery blowers are machines designed to pick items at random from a finite set, without repeating, until the set is exhausted.

The ABC will be named Tombola, after the Italian name of bingo and the tumbling container that mixes the numbers.⁹

The Tombola ABC has four methods. The two abstract methods are:

.load(…): put items into the container.

.pick(): remove one item at random from the container, returning it.

The concrete methods are:

.loaded(): return True if there is at least one item in the container.

.inspect(): return a sorted tuple built from the items currently in the container, without changing its contents (its internal ordering is not preserved).

Figure 11-4 shows the Tombola ABC and three concrete implementations.

Figure 11-4. UML diagram for an ABC and three subclasses. The name of the Tombola ABC and its abstract methods are written in italics, per UML conventions. The dashed arrow is used for interface implementation, here we are using it to show that TomboList is a virtual subclass of Tombola because it is registered, as we will see later in this chapter.¹⁰

Example 11-9 shows the definition of the Tombola ABC.

Example 11-9. tombola.py: Tombola is an ABC with two abstract methods and two concrete methods

import abc

class Tombola(abc.ABC):

    @abc.abstractmethod
    def load(self, iterable):
        """Add items from an iterable."""

    @abc.abstractmethod
    def pick(self):
        """Remove item at random, returning it.

        This method should raise `LookupError` when the instance is empty.
        """

    def loaded(self):
        """Return `True` if there's at least 1 item, `False` otherwise."""
        return bool(self.inspect())

    def inspect(self):
        """Return a sorted tuple with the items currently inside."""
        items = []
        while True:
            try:
                items.append(self.pick())
            except LookupError:
                break
        self.load(items)
        return tuple(sorted(items))

To define an ABC, subclass abc.ABC.

An abstract method is marked with the @abstractmethod decorator, and often its body is empty except for a docstring.¹¹

The docstring instructs implementers to raise LookupError if there are no items to pick.

An ABC may include concrete methods.

Concrete methods in an ABC must rely only on the interface defined by the ABC (i.e., other concrete or abstract methods or properties of the ABC).

We can’t know how concrete subclasses will store the items, but we can build the inspect result by emptying the Tombola with successive calls to .pick()…

…then use .load(…) to put everything back.

Tip

An abstract method can actually have an implementation. Even if it does, subclasses will still be forced to override it, but they will be able to invoke the abstract method with super(), adding functionality to it instead of implementing from scratch. See the abc module documentation for details on @abstractmethod usage.

The .inspect() method in Example 11-9 is perhaps a silly example, but it shows that, given .pick() and .load(…) we can inspect what’s inside the Tombola by picking all items and loading them back. The point of this example is to highlight that it’s OK to provide concrete methods in ABCs, as long as they only depend on other methods in the interface. Being aware of their internal data structures, concrete subclasses of Tombola may always override .inspect() with a smarter implementation, but they don’t have to.

The .loaded() method in Example 11-9 may not be as silly, but it’s expensive: it calls .inspect() to build the sorted tuple just to apply bool() on it. This works, but a concrete subclass can do much better, as we’ll see.

Note that our roundabout implementation of .inspect() requires that we catch a LookupError thrown by self.pick(). The fact that self.pick() may raise LookupError is also part of its interface, but there is no way to declare this in Python, except in the documentation (see the docstring for the abstract pick method in Example 11-9.)

I chose the LookupError exception because of its place in the Python hierarchy of exceptions in relation to IndexError and KeyError, the most likely exceptions to be raised by the data structures used to implement a concrete Tombola. Therefore, implementations can raise LookupError, IndexError, or KeyError to comply. See Example 11-10 (for a complete tree, see “5.4. Exception hierarchy” of The Python Standard Library).

Example 11-10. Part of the Exception class hierarchy

BaseException
 ├── SystemExit
 ├── KeyboardInterrupt
 ├── GeneratorExit
 └── Exception
      ├── StopIteration
      ├── ArithmeticError
      │    ├── FloatingPointError
      │    ├── OverflowError
      │    └── ZeroDivisionError
      ├── AssertionError
      ├── AttributeError
      ├── BufferError
      ├── EOFError
      ├── ImportError
      ├── LookupError
      │    ├── IndexError
      │    └── KeyError
      ├── MemoryError
      ... etc.

LookupError is the exception we handle in Tombola.inspect.

IndexError is the LookupError subclass raised when we try to get an item from a sequence with an index beyond the last position.

KeyError is raised when we use a nonexistent key to get an item from a mapping.

We now have our very own Tombola ABC. To witness the interface checking performed by an ABC, let’s try to fool Tombola with a defective implementation in Example 11-11.

Example 11-11. A fake Tombola doesn’t go undetected

>>> from tombola import Tombola
>>> class Fake(Tombola):
...     def pick(self):
...         return 13
...
>>> Fake
<class '__main__.Fake'>
<class 'abc.ABC'>, <class 'object'>)
>>> f = Fake()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: Can't instantiate abstract class Fake with abstract methods load

Declare Fake as a subclass of Tombola.

The class was created, no errors so far.

TypeError is raised when we try to instantiate Fake. The message is very clear: Fake is considered abstract because it failed to implement load, one of the abstract methods declared in the Tombola ABC.

So we have our first ABC defined, and we put it to work validating a class. We’ll soon subclass the Tombola ABC, but first we must cover some ABC coding rules.

ABC Syntax Details

The best way to declare an ABC is to subclass abc.ABC or any other ABC.

However, the abc.ABC class is new in Python 3.4, so if you are using an earlier version of Python—and it does not make sense to subclass another existing ABC—then you must use the metaclass= keyword in the class statement, pointing to abc.ABCMeta (not abc.ABC). In Example 11-9, we would write:

class Tombola(metaclass=abc.ABCMeta):
    # ...

The metaclass= keyword argument was introduced in Python 3. In Python 2, you must use the __metaclass__ class attribute:

class Tombola(object):  # this is Python 2!!!
    __metaclass__ = abc.ABCMeta
    # ...

We’ll explain metaclasses in Chapter 21. For now, let’s accept that a metaclass is a special kind of class, and agree that an ABC is a special kind of class; for example, “regular” classes don’t check subclasses, so this is a special behavior of ABCs.

Besides the @abstractmethod, the abc module defines the @abstractclassmethod, @abstractstaticmethod, and @abstractproperty decorators. However, these last three are deprecated since Python 3.3, when it became possible to stack decorators on top of @abstractmethod, making the others redundant. For example, the preferred way to declare an abstract class method is:

class MyABC(abc.ABC):
    @classmethod
    @abc.abstractmethod
    def an_abstract_classmethod(cls, ...):
        pass

Warning

The order of stacked function decorators usually matters, and in the case of @abstractmethod, the documentation is explicit:

When abstractmethod() is applied in combination with other method descriptors, it should be applied as the innermost decorator, …¹²

In other words, no other decorator may appear between @abstractmethod and the def statement.

Now that we got these ABC syntax issues covered, let’s put Tombola to use by implementing some full-fledged concrete descendants of it.

Subclassing the Tombola ABC

Given the Tombola ABC, we’ll now develop two concrete subclasses that satisfy its interface. These classes were pictured in Figure 11-4, along with the virtual subclass to be discussed in the next section.

The BingoCage class in Example 11-12 is a variation of Example 5-8 using a better randomizer. This BingoCage implements the required abstract methods load and pick, inherits loaded from Tombola, overrides inspect, and adds __call__.

Example 11-12. bingo.py: BingoCage is a concrete subclass of Tombola

import random

from tombola import Tombola

class BingoCage(Tombola):

    def __init__(self, items):
        self._randomizer = random.SystemRandom()
        self._items = []
        self.load(items)

    def load(self, items):
        self._items.extend(items)
        self._randomizer.shuffle(self._items)

    def pick(self):
        try:
            return self._items.pop()
        except IndexError:
            raise LookupError('pick from empty BingoCage')

    def __call__(self):
        self.pick()

This BingoCage class explicitly extends Tombola.

Pretend we’ll use this for online gaming. random.SystemRandom implements the random API on top of the os.urandom(…) function, which provides random bytes “suitable for cryptographic use” according to the os module docs.

Delegate initial loading to the .load(…) method.

Instead of the plain random.shuffle() function, we use the .shuffle() method of our SystemRandom instance.

pick is implemented as in Example 5-8.

__call__ is also from Example 5-8. It’s not needed to satisfy the Tombola interface, but there’s no harm in adding extra methods.

BingoCage inherits the expensive loaded and the silly inspect methods from Tombola. Both could be overridden with much faster one-liners, as in Example 11-13. The point is: we can be lazy and just inherit the suboptimal concrete methods from an ABC. The methods inherited from Tombola are not as fast as they could be for BingoCage, but they do provide correct results for any Tombola subclass that correctly implements pick and load.

Example 11-13 shows a very different but equally valid implementation of the Tombola interface. Instead of shuffling the “balls” and popping the last, LotteryBlower pops from a random position.

Example 11-13. lotto.py: LotteryBlower is a concrete subclass that overrides the inspect and loaded methods from Tombola

import random

from tombola import Tombola

class LotteryBlower(Tombola):

    def __init__(self, iterable):
        self._balls = list(iterable)

    def load(self, iterable):
        self._balls.extend(iterable)

    def pick(self):
        try:
            position = random.randrange(len(self._balls))
        except ValueError:
            raise LookupError('pick from empty BingoCage')
        return self._balls.pop(position)

    def loaded(self):
        return bool(self._balls)

    def inspect(self):
        return tuple(sorted(self._balls))

The initializer accepts any iterable: the argument is used to build a list.

The random.randrange(…) function raises ValueError if the range is empty, so we catch that and throw LookupError instead, to be compatible with Tombola.

Otherwise the randomly selected item is popped from self._balls.

Override loaded to avoid calling inspect (as Tombola.loaded does in Example 11-9). We can make it faster by working with self._balls directly—no need to build a whole sorted tuple.

Override inspect with one-liner.

Example 11-13 illustrates an idiom worth mentioning: in __init__, self._balls stores list(iterable) and not just a reference to iterable (i.e., we did not merely assign iterable to self._balls). As mentioned before,¹³ this makes our LotteryBlower flexible because the iterable argument may be any iterable type. At the same time, we make sure to store its items in a list so we can pop items. And even if we always get lists as the iterable argument, list(iterable) produces a copy of the argument, which is a good practice considering we will be removing items from it and the client may not be expecting the list of items she provided to be changed.¹⁴

We now come to the crucial dynamic feature of goose typing: declaring virtual subclasses with the register method.

A Virtual Subclass of Tombola

An essential characteristic of goose typing—and the reason why it deserves a waterfowl name—is the ability to register a class as a virtual subclass of an ABC, even if it does not inherit from it. When doing so, we promise that the class faithfully implements the interface defined in the ABC—and Python will believe us without checking. If we lie, we’ll be caught by the usual runtime exceptions.

This is done by calling a register method on the ABC. The registered class then becomes a virtual subclass of the ABC, and will be recognized as such by functions like issubclass and isinstance, but it will not inherit any methods or attributes from the ABC.

Warning

Virtual subclasses do not inherit from their registered ABCs, and are not checked for conformance to the ABC interface at any time, not even when they are instantiated. It’s up to the subclass to actually implement all the methods needed to avoid runtime errors.

The register method is usually invoked as a plain function (see “Usage of register in Practice”), but it can also be used as a decorator. In Example 11-14, we use the decorator syntax and implement TomboList, a virtual subclass of Tombola depicted in Figure 11-5.

TomboList works as advertised, and the doctests that prove it are described in “How the Tombola Subclasses Were Tested”.

Figure 11-5. UML class diagram for the TomboList, a real subclass of list and a virtual subclass of Tombola

Example 11-14. tombolist.py: class TomboList is a virtual subclass of Tombola

from random import randrange

from tombola import Tombola

@Tombola.register
class TomboList(list):

    def pick(self):
        if self:
            position = randrange(len(self))
            return self.pop(position)
        else:
            raise LookupError('pop from empty TomboList')

    load = list.extend

    def loaded(self):
        return bool(self)

    def inspect(self):
        return tuple(sorted(self))

# Tombola.register(TomboList)

Tombolist is registered as a virtual subclass of Tombola.

Tombolist extends list.

Tombolist inherits __bool__ from list, and that returns True if the list is not empty.

Our pick calls self.pop, inherited from list, passing a random item index.

Tombolist.load is the same as list.extend.

loaded delegates to bool.¹⁵

If you’re using Python 3.3 or earlier, you can’t use .register as a class decorator. You must use standard call syntax.

Note that because of the registration, the functions issubclass and isinstance act as if TomboList is a subclass of Tombola:

>>> from tombola import Tombola
>>> from tombolist import TomboList
>>> issubclass(TomboList, Tombola)
True
>>> t = TomboList(range(100))
>>> isinstance(t, Tombola)
True

However, inheritance is guided by a special class attribute named __mro__—the Method Resolution Order. It basically lists the class and its superclasses in the order Python uses to search for methods.¹⁶ If you inspect the __mro__ of TomboList, you’ll see that it lists only the “real” superclasses—list and object:

>>> TomboList.__mro__
(<class 'tombolist.TomboList'>, <class 'list'>, <class 'object'>)

Tombola is not in Tombolist.__mro__, so Tombolist does not inherit any methods from Tombola.

As I coded different classes to implement the same interface, I wanted a way to submit them all to the same suite of doctests. The next section shows how I leveraged the API of regular classes and ABCs to do it.

How the Tombola Subclasses Were Tested

The script I used to test the Tombola examples uses two class attributes that allow introspection of a class hierarchy:

__subclasses__()

Method that returns a list of the immediate subclasses of the class. The list does not include virtual subclasses.

_abc_registry

Data attribute—available only in ABCs—that is bound to a WeakSet with weak references to registered virtual subclasses of the abstract class.

To test all Tombola subclasses, I wrote a script to iterate over a list built from Tombola.__subclasses__() and Tombola._abc_registry, and bind each class to the name ConcreteTombola used in the doctests.

A successful run of the test script looks like this:

$ python3 tombola_runner.py
BingoCage        23 tests,  0 failed - OK
LotteryBlower    23 tests,  0 failed - OK
TumblingDrum     23 tests,  0 failed - OK
TomboList        23 tests,  0 failed - OK

The test script is Example 11-15 and the doctests are in Example 11-16.

Example 11-15. tombola_runner.py: test runner for Tombola subclasses

import doctest

from tombola import Tombola

# modules to test
import bingo, lotto, tombolist, drum

TEST_FILE = 'tombola_tests.rst'
TEST_MSG = '{0:16} {1.attempted:2} tests, {1.failed:2} failed - {2}'

def main(argv):
    verbose = '-v' in argv
    real_subclasses = Tombola.__subclasses__()
    virtual_subclasses = list(Tombola._abc_registry)

    for cls in real_subclasses + virtual_subclasses:
        test(cls, verbose)

def test(cls, verbose=False):

    res = doctest.testfile(
            TEST_FILE,
            globs={'ConcreteTombola': cls},
            verbose=verbose,
            optionflags=doctest.REPORT_ONLY_FIRST_FAILURE)
    tag = 'FAIL' if res.failed else 'OK'
    print(TEST_MSG.format(cls.__name__, res, tag))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys
    main(sys.argv)

Import modules containing real or virtual subclasses of Tombola for testing.

__subclasses__() lists the direct descendants that are alive in memory. That’s why we imported the modules to test, even if there is no further mention of them in the source code: to load the classes into memory.

Build a list from _abc_registry (which is a WeakSet) so we can concatenate it with the result of __subclasses__().

Iterate over the subclasses found, passing each to the test function.

The cls argument—the class to be tested—is bound to the name ConcreteTombola in the global namespace provided to run the doctest.

The test result is printed with the name of the class, the number of tests attempted, tests failed, and an 'OK' or 'FAIL' label.

The doctest file is Example 11-16.

Example 11-16. tombola_tests.rst: doctests for Tombola subclasses

==============
Tombola tests
==============

Every concrete subclass of Tombola should pass these tests.

Create and load instance from iterable::

    >>> balls = list(range(3))
    >>> globe = ConcreteTombola(balls)
    >>> globe.loaded()
    True
    >>> globe.inspect()
    (0, 1, 2)

Pick and collect balls::

    >>> picks = []
    >>> picks.append(globe.pick())
    >>> picks.append(globe.pick())
    >>> picks.append(globe.pick())

Check state and results::

    >>> globe.loaded()
    False
    >>> sorted(picks) == balls
    True

Reload::

    >>> globe.load(balls)
    >>> globe.loaded()
    True
    >>> picks = [globe.pick() for i in balls]
    >>> globe.loaded()
    False

Check that `LookupError` (or a subclass) is the exception
thrown when the device is empty::

    >>> globe = ConcreteTombola([])
    >>> try:
    ...     globe.pick()
    ... except LookupError as exc:
    ...     print('OK')
    OK

Load and pick 100 balls to verify that they all come out::

    >>> balls = list(range(100))
    >>> globe = ConcreteTombola(balls)
    >>> picks = []
    >>> while globe.inspect():
    ...     picks.append(globe.pick())
    >>> len(picks) == len(balls)
    True
    >>> set(picks) == set(balls)
    True

Check that the order has changed and is not simply reversed::

    >>> picks != balls
    True
    >>> picks[::-1] != balls
    True

Note: the previous 2 tests have a *very* small chance of failing
even if the implementation is OK. The probability of the 100
balls coming out, by chance, in the order they were inspect is
1/100!, or approximately 1.07e-158. It's much easier to win the
Lotto or to become a billionaire working as a programmer.

THE END

This concludes our Tombola ABC case study. In the next section, we’ll address how the register ABC function is used in the wild.

Usage of register in Practice

In Example 11-14, we used Tombola.register as a class decorator. Prior to Python 3.3, register could not be used like that—it had to be called as a plain function after the class definition, as suggested by the comment at the end of Example 11-14.

However, even if register can now be used as a decorator, it’s more widely deployed as a function to register classes defined elsewhere. For example, in the source code for the collections.abc module, the built-in types tuple, str, range, and memoryview are registered as virtual subclasses of Sequence like this:

Sequence.register(tuple)
Sequence.register(str)
Sequence.register(range)
Sequence.register(memoryview)

Several other built-in types are registered to ABCs in _collections_abc.py. Those registrations happen only when that module is imported, which is OK because you’ll have to import it anyway to get the ABCs: you need access to MutableMapping to be able to write isinstance(my_dict, MutableMapping).

We’ll wrap up this chapter by explaining a bit of ABC magic that Alex Martelli performed in “Waterfowl and ABCs”.

Geese Can Behave as Ducks

In his Waterfowl and ABCs essay, Alex shows that a class can be recognized as a virtual subclass of an ABC even without registration. Here is his example again, with an added test using issubclass:

>>> class Struggle:
...     def __len__(self): return 23
...
>>> from collections import abc
>>> isinstance(Struggle(), abc.Sized)
True
>>> issubclass(Struggle, abc.Sized)
True

Class Struggle is considered a subclass of abc.Sized by the issubclass function (and, consequently, by isinstance as well) because abc.Sized implements a special class method named __subclasshook__. See Example 11-17.

Example 11-17. Sized definition from the source code of Lib/_collections_abc.py (Python 3.4)

class Sized(metaclass=ABCMeta):

    __slots__ = ()

    @abstractmethod
    def __len__(self):
        return 0

    @classmethod
    def __subclasshook__(cls, C):
        if cls is Sized:
            if any("__len__" in B.__dict__ for B in C.__mro__):
                return True
        return NotImplemented

If there is an attribute named __len__ in the __dict__ of any class listed in C.__mro__ (i.e., C and its superclasses)…

…return True, signaling that C is a virtual subclass of Sized.

Otherwise return NotImplemented to let the subclass check proceed.

If you are interested in the details of the subclass check, see the source code for the ABCMeta.__subclasscheck__ method in Lib/abc.py. Beware: it has lots of ifs and two recursive calls.

The __subclasshook__ adds some duck typing DNA to the whole goose typing proposition. You can have formal interface definitions with ABCs, you can make isinstance checks everywhere, and still have a completely unrelated class play along just because it implements a certain method (or because it does whatever it takes to convince a __subclasshook__ to vouch for it). Of course, this only works for ABCs that do provide a __subclasshook__.

Is it a good idea to implement __subclasshook__ in our own ABCs? Probably not. All the implementations of __subclasshook__ I’ve seen in the Python source code are in ABCs like Sized that declare just one special method, and they simply check for that special method name. Given their “special” status, you can be pretty sure that any method named __len__ does what you expect. But even in the realm of special methods and fundamental ABCs, it can be risky to make such assumptions. For example, mappings implement __len__, __getitem__, and __iter__ but they are rightly not considered a subtype of Sequence, because you can’t retrieve items using an integer offset and they make no guarantees about the ordering of items—except of course for OrderedDict, which preserves the insertion order, but does support item retrieval by offset either.

For ABCs that you and I may write, a __subclasshook__ would be even less dependable. I am not ready to believe that any class named Spam that implements or inherits load, pick, inspect, and loaded is guaranteed to behave as a Tombola. It’s better to let the programmer affirm it by subclassing Spam from Tombola, or at least registering: Tombola.register(Spam). Of course, your __subclasshook__ could also check method signatures and other features, but I just don’t think it’s worthwhile.

Chapter Summary

The goal of this chapter was to travel from the highly dynamic nature of informal interfaces—called protocols—visit the static interface declarations of ABCs, and conclude with the dynamic side of ABCs: virtual subclasses and dynamic subclass detection with __subclasshook__.

We started the journey by reviewing the traditional understanding of interfaces in the Python community. For most of the history of Python, we’ve been mindful of interfaces, but they were informal like the protocols from Smalltalk, and the official docs used language such as “foo protocol,” “foo interface,” and “foo-like object” interchangeably. Protocol-style interfaces have nothing to do with inheritance; each class stands alone when implementing a protocol. That’s what interfaces look like when you embrace duck typing.

With Example 11-3, we observed how deeply Python supports the sequence protocol. If a class implements __getitem__ and nothing else, Python manages to iterate over it, and the in operator just works. We then went back to the old FrenchDeck example of Chapter 1 to support shuffling by dynamically adding a method. This illustrated monkey patching and emphasized the dynamic nature of protocols. Again we saw how a partially implemented protocol can be useful: just adding __setitem__ from the mutable sequence protocol allowed us to leverage a ready-to-use function from the standard library: random.shuffle. Being aware of existing protocols lets us make the most of the rich Python standard library.

Alex Martelli then introduced the term “goose typing”¹⁷ to describe a new style of Python programming. With “goose typing,” ABCs are used to make interfaces explicit and classes may claim to implement an interface by subclassing an ABC or by registering with it—without requiring the strong and static link of an inheritance relationship.

The FrenchDeck2 example made clear the main drawbacks and advantages of explicit ABCs. Inheriting from abc.MutableSequence forced us to implement two methods we did not really need: insert and __delitem__. On the other hand, even a Python newbie can look at FrenchDeck2 and see that it’s a mutable sequence. And, as bonus, we inherited 11 ready-to-use methods from abc.MutableSequence (five indirectly from abc.Sequence).

After a panoramic view of existing ABCs from collections.abc in Figure 11-3, we wrote an ABC from scratch. Doug Hellmann, creator of the cool PyMOTW.com (Python Module of the Week) explains the motivation:

By defining an abstract base class, a common API can be established for a set of subclasses. This capability is especially useful in situations where someone less familiar with the source for an application is going to provide plug-in extensions…¹⁸

Putting the Tombola ABC to work, we created three concrete subclasses: two inheriting from Tombola, the other a virtual subclass registered with it, all passing the same suite of tests.

In concluding the chapter, we mentioned how several built-in types are registered to ABCs in the collections.abc module so you can ask isinstance(memoryview, abc.Sequence) and get True, even if memoryview does not inherit from abc.Sequence. And finally we went over the __subclasshook__ magic, which lets an ABC recognize any unregistered class as a subclass, as long as it passes a test that can be as simple or as complex as you like—the examples in the standard library merely check for method names.

To sum up, I’d like to restate Alex Martelli’s admonition that we should refrain from creating our own ABCs, except when we are building user-extensible frameworks—which most of the time we are not. On a daily basis, our contact with ABCs should be subclassing or registering classes with existing ABCs. Less often than subclassing or registering, we might use ABCs for isinstance checks. And even more rarely—if ever—we find occasion to write a new ABC from scratch.

After 15 years of Python, the first abstract class I ever wrote that is not a didactic example was the Board class of the Pingo project. The drivers that support different single board computers and controllers are subclasses of Board, thus sharing the same interface. In reality, although conceived and implemented as an abstract class, the pingo.Board class does not subclass abc.ABC as I write this.¹⁹ I intend to make Board an explicit ABC eventually—but there are more important things to do in the project.

Here is a fitting quote to end this chapter:

Although ABCs facilitate type checking, it’s not something that you should overuse in a program. At its heart, Python is a dynamic language that gives you great flexibility. Trying to enforce type constraints everywhere tends to result in code that is more complicated than it needs to be. You should embrace Python’s flexibility.²⁰

David Beazley and Brian Jones, Python Cookbook

Or, as technical reviewer Leonardo Rochael wrote: “If you feel tempted to create a custom ABC, please first try to solve your problem through regular duck-typing.”

Further Reading

Beazley and Jones’s Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition (O’Reilly) has a section about defining an ABC (Recipe 8.12). The book was written before Python 3.4, so they don’t use the now preferred syntax when declaring ABCs by subclassing from abc.ABC instead of using the metaclass keyword. Apart from this small detail, the recipe covers the major ABC features very well, and ends with the valuable advice quoted at the end of the previous section.

The Python Standard Library by Example by Doug Hellmann (Addison-Wesley), has a chapter about the abc module. It’s also available on the Web in Doug’s excellent PyMOTW — Python Module of the Week. Both the book and the site focus on Python 2; therefore, adjustments must be made if you are using Python 3. And for Python 3.4, remember that the only recommended ABC method decorator is @abstractmethod—the others were deprecated. The other quote about ABCs in the chapter summary is from Doug’s site and book.

When using ABCs, multiple inheritance is not only common but practically inevitable, because each of the fundamental collection ABCs—Sequence, Mapping, and Set—extends multiple ABCs (see Figure 11-3). Therefore, Chapter 12 is an important follow-up to this one.

PEP 3119 — Introducing Abstract Base Classes gives the rationale for ABCs, and PEP 3141 - A Type Hierarchy for Numbers presents the ABCs of the numbers module.

For a discussion of the pros and cons of dynamic typing, see Guido van Rossum’s interview to Bill Venners in “Contracts in Python: A Conversation with Guido van Rossum, Part IV”.

The zope.interface package provides a way of declaring interfaces, checking whether objects implement them, registering providers, and querying for providers of a given interface. The package started as a core piece of Zope 3, but it can and has been used outside of Zope. It is the basis of the flexible component architecture of large-scale Python projects like Twisted, Pyramid, and Plone. Lennart Regebro has a great introduction to zope.interface in “A Python Component Architecture”. Baiju M wrote an entire book about it: A Comprehensive Guide to Zope Component Architecture.

Soapbox

Type Hints

Probably the biggest news in the Python world in 2014 was that Guido van Rossum gave a green light to the implementation of optional static type checking using function annotations, similar to what the Mypy checker does. This happened in the Python-ideas mailing-list on August 15. The message is Optional static typing — the crossroads. The next month, PEP 484 - Type Hints was published as a draft, authored by Guido.

The idea is to let programmers optionally use annotations to declare parameter and return types in function definitions. The key word here is optionally. You’d only add such annotations if you want the benefits and constraints that come with them, and you could put them in some functions but not in others.

On the surface, this may sound like what Microsoft did with with TypeScript, its JavaScript superset, except that TypeScript goes much further: it adds new language constructs (e.g., modules, classes, explicit interfaces, etc.), allows typed variable declarations, and actually compiles down to plain JavaScript. As of this writing, the goals of optional static typing in Python are much less ambitious.

To understand the reach of this proposal, there is a key point that Guido makes in the historic August 15, 2014, email:

I am going to make one additional assumption: the main use cases will be linting, IDEs, and doc generation. These all have one thing in common: it should be possible to run a program even though it fails to type check. Also, adding types to a program should not hinder its performance (nor will it help :-).

So, it seems this is not such a radical move as it seems at first. PEP 482 - Literature Overview for Type Hints is referenced by PEP 484 - Type Hints, and briefly documents type hints in third-party Python tools and in other languages.

Radical or not, type hints are upon us: support for PEP 484 in the form of a typing module is likely to land in Python 3.5 already. The way the proposal is worded and implemented makes it clear that no existing code will stop running because of the lack of type hints—or their addition, for that matter.

Finally, PEP 484 clearly states:

It should also be emphasized that Python will remain a dynamically typed language, and the authors have no desire to ever make type hints mandatory, even by convention.

Is Python Weakly Typed?

Discussions about language typing disciplines are sometimes confused due to lack of a uniform terminology. Some writers (like Bill Venners in the interview with Guido mentioned in “Further Reading”), say that Python has weak typing, which puts it into the same category of JavaScript and PHP. A better way of talking about typing discipline is to consider two different axes:

Strong versus weak typing

If the language rarely performs implicit conversion of types, it’s considered strongly typed; if it often does it, it’s weakly typed. Java, C++, and Python are strongly typed. PHP, JavaScript, and Perl are weakly typed.

Static versus dynamic typing

If type-checking is performed at compile time, the language is statically typed; if it happens at runtime, it’s dynamically typed. Static typing requires type declarations (some modern languages use type inference to avoid some of that). Fortran and Lisp are the two oldest programming languages still alive and they use, respectively, static and dynamic typing.

Strong typing helps catch bugs early.

Here are some examples of why weak typing is bad:²¹

// this is JavaScript (tested with Node.js v0.10.33)
'' == '0'   // false
0 == ''     // true
0 == '0'    // true
'' < 0      // false
'' < '0'    // true

Python does not perform automatic coercion between strings and numbers, so the == expressions all result False—preserving the transitivity of ==—and the < comparisons raise TypeError in Python 3.

Static typing makes it easier for tools (compilers, IDEs) to analyze code to detect errors and provide other services (optimization, refactoring, etc.). Dynamic typing increases opportunities for reuse, reducing line count, and allows interfaces to emerge naturally as protocols, instead of being imposed early on.

To summarize, Python uses dynamic and strong typing. PEP 484 - Type Hints will not change that, but will allow API authors to add optional type annotations so that tools can perform some static type checking.

Monkey Patching

Monkey patching has a bad reputation. If abused, it can lead to systems that are hard to understand and maintain. The patch is usually tightly coupled with its target, making it brittle. Another problem is that two libraries that apply monkey-patches may step on each other’s toes, with the second library to run destroying patches of the first.

But monkey patching can also be useful, for example, to make a class implement a protocol at runtime. The adapter design pattern solves the same problem by implementing a whole new class.

It’s easy to monkey-patch Python code, but there are limitations. Unlike Ruby and JavaScript, Python does not let you monkey-patch the built-in types. I actually consider this an advantage, because you can be certain that a str object will always have those same methods. This limitation reduces the chance that external libraries try to apply conflicting patches.

Interfaces in Java, Go, and Ruby

Since C++ 2.0 (1989), abstract classes have been used to specify interfaces in that language. The designers of Java opted not to have multiple inheritance of classes, which precluded the use of abstract classes as interface specifications—because often a class needs to implement more than one interface. But they added the interface as a language construct, and a class can implement more than one interface—a form of multiple inheritance. Making interface definitions more explicit than ever was a great contribution of Java. With Java 8, an interface can provide method implementations, called Default Methods. With this, Java interfaces became closer to abstract classes in C++ and Python.

The Go language has a completely different approach. First of all, there is no inheritance in Go. You can define interfaces, but you don’t need (and you actually can’t) explicitly say that a certain type implements an interface. The compiler determines that automatically. So what they have in Go could be called “static duck typing,” in the sense that interfaces are checked at compile time but what matters is what types actually implement.

Compared to Python, it’s as if, in Go, every ABC implemented the __subclasshook__ checking function names and signatures, and you never subclassed or registered an ABC. If we wanted Python to look more like Go, we would have to perform type checks on all function arguments. Some of the infrastructure is available (recall “Function Annotations”). Guido has already said he thinks it’s OK to use those annotations for type checking—at least in support tools. See “Soapbox” in Chapter 5 for more about this.

Rubyists are firm believers in duck typing, and Ruby has no formal way to declare an interface or an abstract class, except to do the same we did in Python prior to 2.6: raise NotImplementedError in the body of methods to make them abstract by forcing the user to subclass and implement them.

Meanwhile, I read that Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, creator of Ruby, said in a keynote in September 2014 that static typing may be in the future of the language. That was at Ruby Kaigi in Japan, one of the most important Ruby conferences every year. As I write this, I haven’t seen a transcript, but Godfrey Chan posted about it on his blog: “Ruby Kaigi 2014: Day 2”. From Chan’s report, it seems Matz focused on function annotations. There is even mention of Python function annotations.

I wonder if function annotations would be really good without ABCs to add structure to the type system without losing flexibility. So maybe formal interfaces are also in the future of Ruby.

I believe Python ABCs, with the register function and __subclasshook__, brought formal interfaces to the language without throwing away the advantages of dynamic typing.

Perhaps the geese are poised to overtake the ducks.

Metaphors and Idioms in Interfaces

A metaphor fosters understanding by making constraints clear. That’s the value of the words “stack” and “queue” in describing those fundamental data structures: they make clear how items can be added or removed. On the other hand, Alan Cooper writes in About Face, 4E (Wiley):

Strict adherence to metaphors ties interfaces unnecessarily tightly to the workings of the physical world.

He’s referring to user interfaces, but the admonition applies to APIs as well. But Cooper does grant that when a “truly appropriate” metaphor “falls on our lap,” we can use it (he writes “falls on our lap” because it’s so hard to find fitting metaphors that you should not spend time actively looking for them). I believe the bingo machine imagery I used in this chapter is appropriate and I stand by it.

About Face is by far the best book about UI design I’ve read—and I’ve read a few. Letting go of metaphors as a design paradigm, and replacing it with “idiomatic interfaces” was the most valuable thing I learned from Cooper’s work. As mentioned, Cooper does not deal with APIs, but the more I think about his ideas, the more I see how they apply to Python. The fundamental protocols of the language are what Cooper calls “idioms.” Once we learn what a “sequence” is we can apply that knowledge in different contexts. This is a main theme of Fluent Python: highlighting the fundamental idioms of the language, so your code is concise, effective, and readable—for a fluent Pythonista.

¹ Bjarne Stroustrup, The Design and Evolution of C++ (Addison-Wesley, 1994), p. 278.

² Issue16518: “add buffer protocol to glossary” was actually resolved by replacing many mentions of “object that supports the buffer protocol/interface/API” with “bytes-like object”; a follow-up issue is “Other mentions of the buffer protocol”.

³ You can also, of course, define your own ABCs—but I would discourage all but the most advanced Pythonistas from going that route, just as I would discourage them from defining their own custom metaclasses… and even for said “most advanced Pythonistas,” those of us sporting deep mastery of every fold and crease in the language, these are not tools for frequent use: such “deep metaprogramming,” if ever appropriate, is intended for authors of broad frameworks meant to be independently extended by vast numbers of separate development teams… less than 1% of “most advanced Pythonistas” may ever need that! — A.M.

⁴ Unfortunately, in Python 3.4, there is no ABC that helps distinguish a str from tuple or other immutable sequences, so we must test against str. In Python 2, the basestr type exists to help with tests like these. It’s not an ABC, but it’s a superclass of both str and unicode; however, in Python 3, basestr is gone. Curiously, there is in Python 3 a collections.abc.ByteString type, but it only helps detecting bytes and bytearray.

⁵ This snippet was extracted from Example 21-2.

⁶ Multiple inheritance was considered harmful and excluded from Java, except for interfaces: Java interfaces can extend multiple interfaces, and Java classes can implement multiple interfaces.

⁷ For callable detection, there is the callable() built-in function—but there is no equivalent hashable() function, so isinstance(my_obj, Hashable) is the preferred way to test for a hashable object.

⁸ Perhaps the client needs to audit the randomizer; or the agency wants to provide a rigged one. You never know…

⁹ The Oxford English Dictionary defines tombola as “A kind of lottery resembling lotto.”

¹⁰ «registered» and «virtual subclass» are not standard UML words. We are using them to represent a class relationship that is specific to Python.

¹¹ Before ABCs existed, abstract methods would use the statement raise NotImplementedError to signal that subclasses were responsible for their implementation.

¹² @abc.abstractmethod entry in the abc module documentation.

¹³ I gave this as an example of duck typing after Martelli’s “Waterfowl and ABCs”.

¹⁴ “Defensive Programming with Mutable Parameters” in Chapter 8 was devoted to the aliasing issue we just avoided here.

¹⁵ The same trick I used with load doesn’t work with loaded, because the list type does not implement __bool__, the method I’d have to bind to loaded. On the other hand, the bool built-in function doesn’t need __bool__ to work because it can also use __len__. See “4.1. Truth Value Testing” in the “Built-in Types” chapter.

¹⁶ There is a whole section explaining the __mro__ class attribute in “Multiple Inheritance and Method Resolution Order”. Right now, this quick explanation will do.

¹⁷ Alex coined the expression “goose typing” and this is the first time ever it appears in a book!

¹⁸ PyMOTW, abc module page, section “Why use Abstract Base Classes?”

¹⁹ You’ll find that in the Python standard library too: classes that are in fact abstract but nobody ever made them explicitly so.

²⁰ Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition (O’Reilly), “Recipe 8.12. Defining an Interface or Abstract Base Class”, p. 276.

²¹ Adapted from Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts (O’Reilly), Appendix B, p. 109.

Chapter 12. Inheritance: For Good or For Worse

[We] started to push on the inheritance idea as a way to let novices build on frameworks that could only be designed by experts.¹.

Alan Kay, The Early History of Smalltalk

This chapter is about inheritance and subclassing, with emphasis on two particulars that are very specific to Python:

The pitfalls of subclassing from built-in types

Multiple inheritance and the method resolution order

Many consider multiple inheritance more trouble than it’s worth. The lack of it certainly did not hurt Java; it probably fueled its widespread adoption after many were traumatized by the excessive use of multiple inheritance in C++.

However, the amazing success and influence of Java means that a lot of programmers come to Python without having seen multiple inheritance in practice. This is why, instead of toy examples, our coverage of multiple inheritance will be illustrated by two important Python projects: the Tkinter GUI toolkit and the Django Web framework.

We’ll start with the issue of subclassing built-ins. The rest of the chapter will cover multiple inheritance with our case studies and discuss good and bad practices when building class hierarchies.

Subclassing Built-In Types Is Tricky

Before Python 2.2, it was not possible to subclass built-in types such as list or dict. Since then, it can be done but there is a major caveat: the code of the built-ins (written in C) does not call special methods overridden by user-defined classes.

A good short description of the problem is in the documentation for PyPy, in “Differences between PyPy and CPython”, section Subclasses of built-in types:

Officially, CPython has no rule at all for when exactly overridden method of subclasses of built-in types get implicitly called or not. As an approximation, these methods are never called by other built-in methods of the same object. For example, an overridden __getitem__() in a subclass of dict will not be called by e.g. the built-in get() method.

Example 12-1 illustrates the problem.

Example 12-1. Our __setitem__ override is ignored by the __init__ and __update__ methods of the built-in dict

>>> class DoppelDict(dict):
...     def __setitem__(self, key, value):
...         super().__setitem__(key, [value] * 2)
...
>>> dd = DoppelDict(one=1)
>>> dd
{'one': 1}
>>> dd['two'] = 2
>>> dd
{'one': 1, 'two': [2, 2]}
>>> dd.update(three=3)
>>> dd
{'three': 3, 'one': 1, 'two': [2, 2]}

DoppelDict.__setitem__ duplicates values when storing (for no good reason, just to have a visible effect). It works by delegating to the superclass.

The __init__ method inherited from dict clearly ignored that __setitem__ was overridden: the value of 'one' is not duplicated.

The [] operator calls our __setitem__ and works as expected: 'two' maps to the duplicated value [2, 2].

The update method from dict does not use our version of __setitem__ either: the value of 'three' was not duplicated.

This built-in behavior is a violation of a basic rule of object-oriented programming: the search for methods should always start from the class of the target instance (self), even when the call happens inside a method implemented in a superclass. In this sad state of affairs, the __missing__ method—which we saw in “The __missing__ Method”—works as documented only because it’s handled as a special case.

The problem is not limited to calls within an instance—whether self.get() calls self.__getitem__())—but also happens with overridden methods of other classes that should be called by the built-in methods. Example 12-2 is an example adapted from the PyPy documentation.

Example 12-2. The __getitem__ of AnswerDict is bypassed by dict.update

>>> class AnswerDict(dict):
...     def __getitem__(self, key):
...         return 42
...
>>> ad = AnswerDict(a='foo')
>>> ad['a']
42
>>> d = {}
>>> d.update(ad)
>>> d['a']
'foo'
>>> d
{'a': 'foo'}

AnswerDict.__getitem__ always returns 42, no matter what the key.

ad is an AnswerDict loaded with the key-value pair ('a', 'foo').

ad['a'] returns 42, as expected.

d is an instance of plain dict, which we update with ad.

The dict.update method ignored our AnswerDict.__getitem__.

Warning

Subclassing built-in types like dict or list or str directly is error-prone because the built-in methods mostly ignore user-defined overrides. Instead of subclassing the built-ins, derive your classes from the collections module using UserDict, UserList, and UserString, which are designed to be easily extended.

If you subclass collections.UserDict instead of dict, the issues exposed in Examples 12-1 and 12-2 are both fixed. See Example 12-3.

Example 12-3. DoppelDict2 and AnswerDict2 work as expected because they extend UserDict and not dict

>>> import collections
>>>
>>> class DoppelDict2(collections.UserDict):
...     def __setitem__(self, key, value):
...         super().__setitem__(key, [value] * 2)
...
>>> dd = DoppelDict2(one=1)
>>> dd
{'one': [1, 1]}
>>> dd['two'] = 2
>>> dd
{'two': [2, 2], 'one': [1, 1]}
>>> dd.update(three=3)
>>> dd
{'two': [2, 2], 'three': [3, 3], 'one': [1, 1]}
>>>
>>> class AnswerDict2(collections.UserDict):
...     def __getitem__(self, key):
...         return 42
...
>>> ad = AnswerDict2(a='foo')
>>> ad['a']
42
>>> d = {}
>>> d.update(ad)
>>> d['a']
42
>>> d
{'a': 42}

As an experiment to measure the extra work required to subclass a built-in, I rewrote the StrKeyDict class from Example 3-8. The original version inherited from collections.UserDict, and implemented just three methods: __missing__, __contains__, and __setitem__. The experimental StrKeyDict subclassed dict directly, and implemented the same three methods with minor tweaks due to the way the data was stored.

But in order to make it pass the same suite of tests, I had to implement __init__, get, and update because the versions inherited from dict refused to cooperate with the overridden __missing__, __contains__, and __setitem__. The UserDict subclass from Example 3-8 has 16 lines, while the experimental dict subclass ended up with 37 lines.²

To summarize: the problem described in this section applies only to method delegation within the C language implementation of the built-in types, and only affects user-defined classes derived directly from those types. If you subclass from a class coded in Python, such as UserDict or MutableMapping, you will not be troubled by this.³

Another matter related to inheritance, particularly of multiple inheritance, is: how does Python decide which attribute to use if superclasses from parallel branches define attributes with the same name? The answer is next.

Multiple Inheritance and Method Resolution Order

Any language implementing multiple inheritance needs to deal with potential naming conflicts when unrelated ancestor classes implement a method by the same name. This is called the “diamond problem,” and is illustrated in Figure 12-1 and Example 12-4.

Figure 12-1. Left: UML class diagram illustrating the “diamond problem.” Right: Dashed arrows depict Python MRO (method resolution order) for Example 12-4.

Example 12-4. diamond.py: classes A, B, C, and D form the graph in Figure 12-1

class A:
    def ping(self):
        print('ping:', self)

class B(A):
    def pong(self):
        print('pong:', self)

class C(A):
    def pong(self):
        print('PONG:', self)

class D(B, C):

    def ping(self):
        super().ping()
        print('post-ping:', self)

    def pingpong(self):
        self.ping()
        super().ping()
        self.pong()
        super().pong()
        C.pong(self)

Note that both classes B and C implement a pong method. The only difference is that C.pong outputs the word PONG in uppercase.

If you call d.pong() on an instance of D, which pong method actually runs? In C++, the programmer must qualify method calls with class names to resolve this ambiguity. This can be done in Python as well. Take a look at Example 12-5.

Example 12-5. Two ways of invoking method pong on an instance of class D

>>> from diamond import *
>>> d = D()
>>> d.pong()
pong: <diamond.D object at 0x10066c278>
>>> C.pong(d)
PONG: <diamond.D object at 0x10066c278>

Simply calling d.pong() causes the B version to run.

You can always call a method on a superclass directly, passing the instance as an explicit argument.

The ambiguity of a call like d.pong() is resolved because Python follows a specific order when traversing the inheritance graph. That order is called MRO: Method Resolution Order. Classes have an attribute called __mro__ holding a tuple of references to the superclasses in MRO order, from the current class all the way to the object class. For the D class, this is the __mro__ (see Figure 12-1):

>>> D.__mro__
(<class 'diamond.D'>, <class 'diamond.B'>, <class 'diamond.C'>,
<class 'diamond.A'>, <class 'object'>)

The recommended way to delegate method calls to superclasses is the super() built-in function, which became easier to use in Python 3, as method pingpong of class D in Example 12-4 illustrates.⁴ However, it’s also possible, and sometimes convenient, to bypass the MRO and invoke a method on a superclass directly. For example, the D.ping method could be written as:

    def ping(self):
        A.ping(self)  # instead of super().ping()
        print('post-ping:', self)

Note that when calling an instance method directly on a class, you must pass self explicitly, because you are accessing an unbound method.

However, it’s safest and more future-proof to use super(), especially when calling methods on a framework, or any class hierarchies you do not control. Example 12-6 shows that super() follows the MRO when invoking a method.

Example 12-6. Using super() to call ping (source code in Example 12-4)

>>> from diamond import D
>>> d = D()
>>> d.ping()
ping: <diamond.D object at 0x10cc40630>
post-ping: <diamond.D object at 0x10cc40630>

The ping of D makes two calls.

The first call is super().ping(); the super delegates the ping call to class A; A.ping outputs this line.

The second call is print('post-ping:', self), which outputs this line.

Now let’s see what happens when pingpong is called on an instance of D. See Example 12-7.

Example 12-7. The five calls made by pingpong (source code in Example 12-4)

>>> from diamond import D
>>> d = D()
>>> d.pingpong()
ping: <diamond.D object at 0x10bf235c0>
post-ping: <diamond.D object at 0x10bf235c0>
ping: <diamond.D object at 0x10bf235c0>
pong: <diamond.D object at 0x10bf235c0>
pong: <diamond.D object at 0x10bf235c0>
PONG: <diamond.D object at 0x10bf235c0>

Call #1 is self.ping(), which runs the ping method of D, which outputs this line and the next one.

Call #2 is super().ping(), which bypasses the ping in D and finds the ping method in A.

Call #3 is self.pong(), which finds the B implementation of pong, according to the __mro__.

Call #4 is super().pong(), which finds the same B.pong implementation, also following the __mro__.

Call #5 is C.pong(self), which finds the C.pong implementation, ignoring the __mro__.

The MRO takes into account not only the inheritance graph but also the order in which superclasses are listed in a subclass declaration. In other words, if in diamond.py (Example 12-4) the D class was declared as class D(C, B):, the __mro__ of class D would be different: C would be searched before B.

I often check the __mro__ of classes interactively when I am studying them. Example 12-8 has some examples using familiar classes.

Example 12-8. Inspecting the __mro__ attribute in several classes

>>> bool.__mro__
(<class 'bool'>, <class 'int'>, <class 'object'>)
>>> def print_mro(cls):
...     print(', '.join(c.__name__ for c in cls.__mro__))
...
>>> print_mro(bool)
bool, int, object
>>> from frenchdeck2 import FrenchDeck2
>>> print_mro(FrenchDeck2)
FrenchDeck2, MutableSequence, Sequence, Sized, Iterable, Container, object
>>> import numbers
>>> print_mro(numbers.Integral)
Integral, Rational, Real, Complex, Number, object
>>> import io
>>> print_mro(io.BytesIO)
BytesIO, _BufferedIOBase, _IOBase, object
>>> print_mro(io.TextIOWrapper)
TextIOWrapper, _TextIOBase, _IOBase, object

bool inherits methods and attributes from int and object.

print_mro produces more compact displays of the MRO.

The ancestors of FrenchDeck2 include several ABCs from the collections.abc module.

These are the numeric ABCs provided by the numbers module.

The io module includes ABCs (those with the …Base suffix) and concrete classes like BytesIO and TextIOWrapper, which are the types of binary and text file objects returned by open(), depending on the mode argument.

Note

The MRO is computed using an algorithm called C3. The canonical paper on the Python MRO explaining C3 is Michele Simionato’s “The Python 2.3 Method Resolution Order”. If you are interested in the subtleties of the MRO, “Further Reading” has other pointers. But don’t fret too much about this, the algorithm is sensible; as Simionato writes:

[…] unless you make strong use of multiple inheritance and you have non-trivial hierarchies, you don’t need to understand the C3 algorithm, and you can easily skip this paper.

To wrap up this discussion of the MRO, Figure 12-2 illustrates part of the complex multiple inheritance graph of the Tkinter GUI toolkit from the Python standard library. To study the picture, start at the Text class at the bottom. The Text class implements a full featured, multiline editable text widget. It has rich functionality of its own, but also inherits many methods from other classes. The left side shows a plain UML class diagram. On the right, it’s decorated with arrows showing the MRO, as listed here with the help of the print_mro convenience function defined in Example 12-8:

>>> import tkinter
>>> print_mro(tkinter.Text)
Text, Widget, BaseWidget, Misc, Pack, Place, Grid, XView, YView, object

In the next section, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of multiple inheritance, with examples from real frameworks that use it.

Figure 12-2. Left: UML class diagram of the Tkinter Text widget class and its superclasses. Right: Dashed arrows depict Text.__mro__.

Multiple Inheritance in the Real World

It is possible to put multiple inheritance to good use. The Adapter pattern in the Design Patterns book uses multiple inheritance, so it can’t be completely wrong to do it (the remaining 22 patterns in the book use single inheritance only, so multiple inheritance is clearly not a cure-all).

In the Python standard library, the most visible use of multiple inheritance is the collections.abc package. That is not controversial: after all, even Java supports multiple inheritance of interfaces, and ABCs are interface declarations that may optionally provide concrete method implementations.⁵

An extreme example of multiple inheritance in the standard library is the Tkinter GUI toolkit (module tkinter: Python interface to Tcl/Tk). I used part of the Tkinter widget hierarchy to illustrate the MRO in Figure 12-2, but Figure 12-3 shows all the widget classes in the tkinter base package (there are more widgets in the tkinter.ttk sub-package).

Figure 12-3. Summary UML diagram for the Tkinter GUI class hierarchy; classes tagged «mixin» are designed to provide concrete methods to other classes via multiple inheritance

Tkinter is 20 years old as I write this, and is not an example of current best practices. But it shows how multiple inheritance was used when coders did not appreciate its drawbacks. And it will serve as a counter-example when we cover some good practices in the next section.

Consider these classes from Figure 12-3:

➊ Toplevel: The class of a top-level window in a Tkinter application.

➋ Widget: The superclass of every visible object that can be placed on a window.

➌ Button: A plain button widget.

➍ Entry: A single-line editable text field.

➎ Text: A multiline editable text field.

Here are the MROs of those classes, displayed by the print_mro function from Example 12-8:

>>> import tkinter
>>> print_mro(tkinter.Toplevel)
Toplevel, BaseWidget, Misc, Wm, object
>>> print_mro(tkinter.Widget)
Widget, BaseWidget, Misc, Pack, Place, Grid, object
>>> print_mro(tkinter.Button)
Button, Widget, BaseWidget, Misc, Pack, Place, Grid, object
>>> print_mro(tkinter.Entry)
Entry, Widget, BaseWidget, Misc, Pack, Place, Grid, XView, object
>>> print_mro(tkinter.Text)
Text, Widget, BaseWidget, Misc, Pack, Place, Grid, XView, YView, object

Things to note about how these classes relate to others:

Toplevel is the only graphical class that does not inherit from Widget, because it is the top-level window and does not behave like a widget—for example, it cannot be attached to a window or frame. Toplevel inherits from Wm, which provides direct access functions of the host window manager, like setting the window title and configuring its borders.

Widget inherits directly from BaseWidget and from Pack, Place, and Grid. These last three classes are geometry managers: they are responsible for arranging widgets inside a window or frame. Each encapsulates a different layout strategy and widget placement API.

Button, like most widgets, descends only from Widget, but indirectly from Misc, which provides dozens of methods to every widget.

Entry subclasses Widget and XView, the class that implements horizontal scrolling.

Text subclasses from Widget, XView, and YView, which provides vertical scrolling functionality.

We’ll now discuss some good practices of multiple inheritance and see whether Tkinter goes along with them.

Coping with Multiple Inheritance

[…] we needed a better theory about inheritance entirely (and still do). For example, inheritance and instancing (which is a kind of inheritance) muddles both pragmatics (such as factoring code to save space) and semantics (used for way too many tasks such as: specialization, generalization, speciation, etc.).

Alan Kay, The Early History of Smalltalk

As Alan Kay wrote, inheritance is used for different reasons, and multiple inheritance adds alternatives and complexity. It’s easy to create incomprehensible and brittle designs using multiple inheritance. Because we don’t have a comprehensive theory, here are a few tips to avoid spaghetti class graphs.

1. Distinguish Interface Inheritance from Implementation Inheritance

When dealing with multiple inheritance, it’s useful to keep straight the reasons why subclassing is done in the first place. The main reasons are:

Inheritance of interface creates a subtype, implying an “is-a” relationship.

Inheritance of implementation avoids code duplication by reuse.

In practice, both uses are often simultaneous, but whenever you can make the intent clear, do it. Inheritance for code reuse is an implementation detail, and it can often be replaced by composition and delegation. On the other hand, interface inheritance is the backbone of a framework.

2. Make Interfaces Explicit with ABCs

In modern Python, if a class is designed to define an interface, it should be an explicit ABC. In Python ≥ 3.4, this means: subclass abc.ABC or another ABC (see “ABC Syntax Details” if you need to support older Python versions).

3. Use Mixins for Code Reuse

If a class is designed to provide method implementations for reuse by multiple unrelated subclasses, without implying an “is-a” relationship, it should be an explicit mixin class. Conceptually, a mixin does not define a new type; it merely bundles methods for reuse. A mixin should never be instantiated, and concrete classes should not inherit only from a mixin. Each mixin should provide a single specific behavior, implementing few and very closely related methods.

4. Make Mixins Explicit by Naming

There is no formal way in Python to state that a class is a mixin, so it is highly recommended that they are named with a …Mixin suffix. Tkinter does not follow this advice, but if it did, XView would be XViewMixin, Pack would be PackMixin, and so on with all the classes where I put the «mixin» tag in Figure 12-3.

5. An ABC May Also Be a Mixin; The Reverse Is Not True

Because an ABC can implement concrete methods, it works as a mixin as well. An ABC also defines a type, which a mixin does not. And an ABC can be the sole base class of any other class, while a mixin should never be subclassed alone except by another, more specialized mixin—not a common arrangement in real code.

One restriction applies to ABCs and not to mixins: the concrete methods implemented in an ABC should only collaborate with methods of the same ABC and its superclasses. This implies that concrete methods in an ABC are always for convenience, because everything they do, a user of the class can also do by calling other methods of the ABC.

6. Don’t Subclass from More Than One Concrete Class

Concrete classes should have zero or at most one concrete superclass.⁶ In other words, all but one of the superclasses of a concrete class should be ABCs or mixins. For example, in the following code, if Alpha is a concrete class, then Beta and Gamma must be ABCs or mixins:

class MyConcreteClass(Alpha, Beta, Gamma):
    """This is a concrete class: it can be instantiated."""
    # ... more code ...

7. Provide Aggregate Classes to Users

If some combination of ABCs or mixins is particularly useful to client code, provide a class that brings them together in a sensible way. Grady Booch calls this an aggregate class.⁷

For example, here is the complete source code for tkinter.Widget:

class Widget(BaseWidget, Pack, Place, Grid):
    """Internal class.

    Base class for a widget which can be positioned with the
    geometry managers Pack, Place or Grid."""
    pass

The body of Widget is empty, but the class provides a useful service: it brings together four superclasses so that anyone who needs to create a new widget does not need to remember all those mixins, or wonder if they need to be declared in a certain order in a class statement. A better example of this is the Django ListView class, which we’ll discuss shortly, in “A Modern Example: Mixins in Django Generic Views”.

8. “Favor Object Composition Over Class Inheritance.”

This quote comes straight the Design Patterns book,⁸ and is the best advice I can offer here. Once you get comfortable with inheritance, it’s too easy to overuse it. Placing objects in a neat hierarchy appeals to our sense of order; programmers do it just for fun.

However, favoring composition leads to more flexible designs. For example, in the case of the tkinter.Widget class, instead of inheriting the methods from all geometry managers, widget instances could hold a reference to a geometry manager, and invoke its methods. After all, a Widget should not “be” a geometry manager, but could use the services of one via delegation. Then you could add a new geometry manager without touching the widget class hierarchy and without worrying about name clashes. Even with single inheritance, this principle enhances flexibility, because subclassing is a form of tight coupling, and tall inheritance trees tend to be brittle.

Composition and delegation can replace the use of mixins to make behaviors available to different classes, but cannot replace the use of interface inheritance to define a hierarchy of types.

We will now analyze Tkinter from the point of view of these recommendations.

Tkinter: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Note

Keep in mind that Tkinter has been part of the standard library since Python 1.1 was released in 1994. Tkinter is a layer on top of the excellent Tk GUI toolkit of the Tcl language. The Tcl/Tk combo is not originally object oriented, so the Tk API is basically a vast catalog of functions. However, the toolkit is very object oriented in its concepts, if not in its implementation.

Most advice in the previous section is not followed by Tkinter, with #7 being a notable exception. Even then, it’s not a great example, because composition would probably work better for integrating the geometry managers into Widget, as discussed in #8.

The docstring of tkinter.Widget starts with the words “Internal class.” This suggests that Widget should probably be an ABC. Although Widget has no methods of its own, it does define an interface. Its message is: “You can count on every Tkinter widget providing basic widget methods (__init__, destroy, and dozens of Tk API functions), in addition to the methods of all three geometry managers.” We can agree that this is not a great interface definition (it’s just too broad), but it is an interface, and Widget “defines” it as the union of the interfaces of its superclasses.

The Tk class, which encapsulates the GUI application logic, inherits from Wm and Misc, neither of which are abstract or mixin (Wm is not proper mixin because TopLevel subclasses only from it). The name of the Misc class is—by itself—a very strong code smell. Misc has more than 100 methods, and all widgets inherit from it. Why is it necessary that every single widget has methods for clipboard handling, text selection, timer management, and the like? You can’t really paste into a button or select text from a scrollbar. Misc should be split into several specialized mixin classes, and not all widgets should inherit from every one of those mixins.

To be fair, as a Tkinter user, you don’t need to know or use multiple inheritance at all. It’s an implementation detail hidden behind the widget classes that you will instantiate or subclass in your own code. But you will suffer the consequences of excessive multiple inheritance when you type dir(tkinter.Button) and try to find the method you need among the 214 attributes listed.

Despite the problems, Tkinter is stable, flexible, and not necessarily ugly. The legacy (and default) Tk widgets are not themed to match modern user interfaces, but the tkinter.ttk package provides pretty, native-looking widgets, making professional GUI development viable since Python 3.1 (2009). Also, some of the legacy widgets, like Canvas and Text, are incredibly powerful. With just a little coding, you can turn a Canvas object into a simple drag-and-drop drawing application. Tkinter and Tcl/Tk are definitely worth a look if you are interested in GUI programming.

However, our theme here is not GUI programming, but the practice of multiple inheritance. A more up-to-date example with explicit mixin classes can be found in Django.

A Modern Example: Mixins in Django Generic Views

Note

You don’t need to know Django to follow this section. I am just using a small part of the framework as a practical example of multiple inheritance, and I will try to give all the necessary background, assuming you have some experience with server-side web development in another language or framework.

In Django, a view is a callable object that takes, as argument, an object representing an HTTP request and returns an object representing an HTTP response. The different responses are what interests us in this discussion. They can be as simple as a redirect response, with no content body, or as complex as a catalog page in an online store, rendered from an HTML template and listing multiple merchandise with buttons for buying and links to detail pages.

Originally, Django provided a set of functions, called generic views, that implemented some common use cases. For example, many sites need to show search results that include information from numerous items, with the listing spanning multiple pages, and for each item a link to a page with detailed information about it. In Django, a list view and a detail view are designed to work together to solve this problem: a list view renders search results, and a detail view produces pages for individual items.

However, the original generic views were functions, so they were not extensible. If you needed to do something similar but not exactly like a generic list view, you’d have to start from scratch.

In Django 1.3, the concept of class-based views was introduced, along with a set of generic view classes organized as base classes, mixins, and ready-to-use concrete classes. The base classes and mixins are in the base module of the django.views.generic package, pictured in Figure 12-4. At the top of the diagram we see two classes that take care of very distinct responsibilities: View and TemplateResponseMixin.

Tip

A great resource to study these classes is the Classy Class-Based Views website, where you can easily navigate through them, see all methods in each class (inherited, overridden, and added methods), view diagrams, browse their documentation, and jump to their source code on GitHub.

View is the base class of all views (it could be an ABC), and it provides core functionality like the dispatch method, which delegates to “handler” methods like get, head, post, etc., implemented by concrete subclasses to handle the different HTTP verbs.⁹ The RedirectView class inherits only from View, and you can see that it implements get, head, post, etc.

Concrete subclasses of View are supposed to implement the handler methods, so why aren’t they part of the View interface? The reason: subclasses are free to implement just the handlers they want to support. A TemplateView is used only to display content, so it only implements get. If an HTTP POST request is sent to a TemplateView, the inherited View.dispatch method checks that there is no post handler, and produces an HTTP 405 Method Not Allowed response.¹⁰

Figure 12-4. UML class diagram for the django.views.generic.base module

The TemplateResponseMixin provides functionality that is of interest only to views that need to use a template. A RedirectView, for example, has no content body, so it has no need of a template and it does not inherit from this mixin. TemplateResponseMixin provides behaviors to TemplateView and other template-rendering views, such as ListView, DetailView, etc., defined in other modules of the django.views.generic package. Figure 12-5 depicts the django.views.generic.list module and part of the base module.

Figure 12-5. UML class diagram for the django.views.generic.list module. Here the three classes of the base module are collapsed (see Figure 12-4). The ListView class has no methods or attributes: it’s an aggregate class.

For Django users, the most important class in Figure 12-5 is ListView, which is an aggregate class, with no code at all (its body is just a docstring). When instantiated, a ListView has an object_list instance attribute through which the template can iterate to show the page contents, usually the result of a database query returning multiple objects. All the functionality related to generating this iterable of objects comes from the MultipleObjectMixin. That mixin also provides the complex pagination logic—to display part of the results in one page and links to more pages.

Suppose you want to create a view that will not render a template, but will produce a list of objects in JSON format. That’s why the BaseListView exists. It provides an easy-to-use extension point that brings together View and MultipleObjectMixin functionality, without the overhead of the template machinery.

The Django class-based views API is a better example of multiple inheritance than Tkinter. In particular, it is easy to make sense of its mixin classes: each has a well-defined purpose, and they are all named with the …Mixin suffix.

Class-based views were not universally embraced by Django users. Many do use them in a limited way, as black boxes, but when it’s necessary to create something new, a lot of Django coders continue writing monolithic view functions that take care of all those responsibilities, instead of trying to reuse the base views and mixins.

It does take some time to learn how to leverage class-based views and how to extend them to fulfill specific application needs, but I found that it was worthwhile to study them: they eliminate a lot of boilerplate code, make it easier to reuse solutions, and even improve team communication—for example, by defining standard names to templates, and to the variables passed to template contexts. Class-based views are Django views “on rails.”

This concludes our tour of multiple inheritance and mixin classes.

Chapter Summary

We started our coverage of inheritance explaining the problem with subclassing built-in types: their native methods implemented in C do not call overridden methods in subclasses, except in very few special cases. That’s why, when we need a custom list, dict, or str type, it’s easier to subclass UserList, UserDict, or UserString—all defined in the collections module, which actually wraps the built-in types and delegate operations to them—three examples of favoring composition over inheritance in the standard library. If the desired behavior is very different from what the built-ins offer, it may be easier to subclass the appropriate ABC from collections.abc and write your own implementation.

The rest of the chapter was devoted to the double-edged sword of multiple inheritance. First we saw how the method resolution order, encoded in the __mro__ class attribute, addresses the problem of potential naming conflicts in inherited methods. We also saw how the super() built-in follows the __mro__ to call a method on a superclass. We then studied how multiple inheritance is used in the Tkinter GUI toolkit that comes with the Python standard library. Tkinter is not an example of current best practices, so we discussed some ways of coping with multiple inheritance, including careful use of mixin classes and avoiding multiple inheritance altogether by using composition instead. After considering how multiple inheritance is abused in Tkinter, we wrapped up by studying the core parts of the Django class-based views hierarchy, which I consider a better example of mixin usage.

Lennart Regebro—a very experienced Pythonista and one of this book’s technical reviewers—finds the design of Django’s mixin views hierarchy confusing. But he also wrote:

The dangers and badness of multiple inheritance are greatly overblown. I’ve actually never had a real big problem with it.

In the end, each of us may have different opinions about how to use multiple inheritance, or whether to use it at all in our own projects. But often we don’t have a choice: the frameworks we must use impose their own choices.

Further Reading

When using ABCs, multiple inheritance is not only common but practically inevitable, because each of the most fundamental collection ABCs (Sequence, Mapping, and Set) extend multiple ABCs. The source code for collections.abc (Lib/_collections_abc.py) is a good example of multiple inheritance with ABCs—many of which are also mixin classes.

Raymond Hettinger’s post Python’s super() considered super! explains the workings of super and multiple inheritance in Python from a positive perspective. It was written in response to Python’s Super is nifty, but you can’t use it (a.k.a. Python’s Super Considered Harmful) by James Knight.

Despite the titles of those posts, the problem is not really the super built-in—which in Python 3 is not as ugly as it was in Python 2. The real issue is multiple inheritance, which is inherently complicated and tricky. Michele Simionato goes beyond criticizing and actually offers a solution in his Setting Multiple Inheritance Straight: he implements traits, a constrained form of mixins that originated in the Self language. Simionato has a long series of illuminating blog posts about multiple inheritance in Python, including The wonders of cooperative inheritance, or using super in Python 3; Mixins considered harmful, part 1 and part 2; and Things to Know About Python Super, part 1, part 2 and part 3. The oldest posts use the Python 2 super syntax, but are still relevant.

I read the first edition of Grady Booch’s Object Oriented Analysis and Design, 3E (Addison-Wesley, 2007), and highly recommend it as a general primer on object oriented thinking, independent of programming language. It is a rare book that covers multiple inheritance without prejudice.

Soapbox

Think About the Classes You Really Need

The vast majority of programmers write applications, not frameworks. Even those who do write frameworks are likely to spend a lot (if not most) of their time writing applications. When we write applications, we normally don’t need to code class hierarchies. At most, we write classes that subclass from ABCs or other classes provided by the framework. As application developers, it’s very rare that we need to write a class that will act as the superclass of another. The classes we code are almost always leaf classes (i.e., leaves of the inheritance tree).

If, while working as an application developer, you find yourself building multilevel class hierarchies, it’s likely that one or more of the following applies:

You are reinventing the wheel. Go look for a framework or library that provides components you can reuse in your application.

You are using a badly designed framework. Go look for an alternative.

You are overengineering. Remember the KISS principle.

You became bored coding applications and decided to start a new framework. Congratulations and good luck!

It’s also possible that all of the above apply to your situation: you became bored and decided to reinvent the wheel by building your own overengineered and badly designed framework, which is forcing you to code class after class to solve trivial problems. Hopefully you are having fun, or at least getting paid for it.

Misbehaving Built-ins: Bug or Feature?

The built-in dict, list, and str types are essential building blocks of Python itself, so they must be fast—any performance issues in them would severely impact pretty much everything else. That’s why CPython adopted the shortcuts that cause their built-in methods to misbehave by not cooperating with methods overridden by subclasses. A possible way out of this dilemma would be to offer two implementations for each of those types: one “internal,” optimized for use by the interpreter and an external, easily extensible one.

But wait, this is what we have: UserDict, UserList, and UserString are not as fast as the built-ins but are easily extensible. The pragmatic approach taken by CPython means we also get to use, in our own applications, the highly optimized implementations that are hard to subclass. Which makes sense, considering that it’s not so often that we need a custom mapping, list, or string, but we use dict, list and str every day. We just need to be aware of the trade-offs involved.

Inheritance Across Languages

Alan Kay coined the term “object oriented,” and Smalltalk had only single inheritance, although there are forks with various forms of multiple inheritance support, including the modern Squeak and Pharo Smalltalk dialects that support traits—a language construct that fulfills the role of a mixin class, while avoiding some of the issues with multiple inheritance.

The first popular language to implement multiple inheritance was C++, and the feature was abused enough that Java—intended as a C++ replacement—was designed without support for multiple inheritance of implementation (i.e., no mixin classes). That is, until Java 8 introduced default methods that make interfaces very similar to the abstract classes used to define interfaces in C++ and in Python. Except that Java interfaces cannot have state—a key distinction. After Java, probably the most widely deployed JVM language is Scala, and it implements traits. Other languages supporting traits are the latest stable versions of PHP and Groovy, and the under-construction languages Rust and Perl 6—so it’s fair to say that traits are trendy as I write this.

Ruby offers an original take on multiple inheritance: it does not support it, but introduces mixins as a language feature. A Ruby class can include a module in its body, so the methods defined in the module become part of the class implementation. This is a “pure” form of mixin, with no inheritance involved, and it’s clear that a Ruby mixin has no influence on the type of the class where it’s used. This provides the benefits of mixins, while avoiding many of its usual problems.

Two recent languages that are getting a lot of traction severely limit inheritance: Go and Julia. Go has no inheritance at all, but it implements interfaces in a way that resembles a static form of duck typing (see “Soapbox” for more about this). Julia avoids the terms “classes” and has only “types.” Julia has a type hierarchy but subtypes cannot inherit structure, only behaviors, and only abstract types can be subtyped. In addition, Julia methods are implemented using multiple dispatch—a more advanced form of the mechanism we saw in “Generic Functions with Single Dispatch”.

¹ Alan Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk,” in SIGPLAN Not. 28, 3 (March 1993), 69–95. Also available online. Thanks to my friend Christiano Anderson who shared this reference as I was writing this chapter.

² If you are curious, the experiment is in the strkeydict_dictsub.py file in the Fluent Python code repository.

³ By the way, in this regard, PyPy behaves more “correctly” than CPython, at the expense of introducing a minor incompatibility. See “Differences between PyPy and CPython” for details.

⁴ In Python 2, the second line of D.pingpong would be written as super(D, self).ping() rather than super().ping().

⁵ As previously mentioned, Java 8 allows interfaces to provide method implementations as well. The new feature is called Default Methods in the official Java Tutorial.

⁶ In “Waterfowl and ABCs”, Alex Martelli quotes Scott Meyer’s More Effective C++, which goes even further: “all non-leaf classes should be abstract” (i.e., concrete classes should not have concrete superclasses at all).

⁷ “A class that is constructed primarily by inheriting from mixins and does not add its own structure or behavior is called an aggregate class.”, Grady Booch et al., Object Oriented Analysis and Design, 3E (Addison-Wesley, 2007), p. 109.

⁸ Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Introduction, p. 20.

⁹ Django programmers know that the as_view class method is the most visible part of the View interface, but it’s not relevant to us here.

¹⁰ If you are into design patterns, you’ll notice that the Django dispatch mechanism is a dynamic variation of the Template Method pattern. It’s dynamic because the View class does not force subclasses to implement all handlers, but dispatch checks at runtime if a concrete handler is available for the specific request.

Chapter 13. Operator Overloading: Doing It Right

There are some things that I kind of feel torn about, like operator overloading. I left out operator overloading as a fairly personal choice because I had seen too many people abuse it in C++.¹

James Gosling, Creator of Java

Operator overloading allows user-defined objects to interoperate with infix operators such as + and | or unary operators like - and ~. More generally, function invocation (()), attribute access (.), and item access/slicing ([]) are also operators in Python, but this chapter covers unary and infix operators.

In “Emulating Numeric Types” (Chapter 1) we saw some trivial implementations of operators in a bare bones Vector class. The __add__ and __mul__ methods in Example 1-2 were written to show how special methods support operator overloading, but there are subtle problems in their implementations that we overlooked. Also, in Example 9-2, we noted that the Vector2d.__eq__ method considers this to be True: Vector(3, 4) == [3, 4]—which may or not make sense. We will address those matters in this chapter.

In the following sections, we will cover:

How Python supports infix operators with operands of different types

Using duck typing or explicit type checks to deal with operands of various types

How an infix operator method should signal it cannot handle an operand

The special behavior of the rich comparison operators (e.g., ==, >, <=, etc.)

The default handling of augmented assignment operators, like +=, and how to overload them

Operator Overloading 101

Operator overloading has a bad name in some circles. It is a language feature that can be (and has been) abused, resulting in programmer confusion, bugs, and unexpected performance bottlenecks. But if well used, it leads to pleasurable APIs and readable code. Python strikes a good balance between flexibility, usability, and safety by imposing some limitations:

We cannot overload operators for the built-in types.

We cannot create new operators, only overload existing ones.

A few operators can’t be overloaded: is, and, or, not (but the bitwise &, |, ~, can).

In Chapter 10, we already had one infix operator in Vector: ==, supported by the __eq__ method. In this chapter, we’ll improve the implementation of __eq__ to better handle operands of types other than Vector. However, the rich comparison operators (==, !=, >, <, >=, <=) are special cases in operator overloading, so we’ll start by overloading four arithmetic operators in Vector: the unary - and +, followed by the infix + and *.

Let’s start with the easiest topic: unary operators.

Unary Operators

In The Python Language Reference, “6.5. Unary arithmetic and bitwise operations” lists three unary operators, shown here with their associated special methods:

- (__neg__)

Arithmetic unary negation. If x is -2 then -x == 2.

+ (__pos__)

Arithmetic unary plus. Usually x == +x, but there are a few cases when that’s not true. See “When x and +x Are Not Equal” if you’re curious.

~ (__invert__)

Bitwise inverse of an integer, defined as ~x == -(x+1). If x is 2 then ~x == -3.

The Data Model” chapter of The Python Language Reference also lists the abs(…) built-in function as a unary operator. The associated special method is __abs__, as we’ve seen before, starting with “Emulating Numeric Types”.

It’s easy to support the unary operators. Simply implement the appropriate special method, which will receive just one argument: self. Use whatever logic makes sense in your class, but stick to the fundamental rule of operators: always return a new object. In other words, do not modify self, but create and return a new instance of a suitable type.

In the case of - and +, the result will probably be an instance of the same class as self; for +, returning a copy of self is the best approach most of the time. For abs(…), the result should be a scalar number. As for ~, it’s difficult to say what would be a sensible result if you’re not dealing with bits in an integer, but in an ORM it could make sense to return the negation of an SQL WHERE clause, for example.

As promised before, we’ll implement several new operators on the Vector class from Chapter 10. Example 13-1 shows the __abs__ method we already had in Example 10-16, and the newly added __neg__ and __pos__ unary operator method.

Example 13-1. vector_v6.py: unary operators - and + added to Example 10-16

    def __abs__(self):
        return math.sqrt(sum(x * x for x in self))

    def __neg__(self):
        return Vector(-x for x in self)

    def __pos__(self):
        return Vector(self)

To compute -v, build a new Vector with every component of self negated.

To compute +v, build a new Vector with every component of self.

Recall that Vector instances are iterable, and the Vector.__init__ takes an iterable argument, so the implementations of __neg__ and __pos__ are short and sweet.

We’ll not implement __invert__, so if the user tries ~v on a Vector instance, Python will raise TypeError with a clear message: “bad operand type for unary ~: 'Vector'.”

The following sidebar covers a curiosity that may help you win a bet about unary + someday. The next important topic is “Overloading + for Vector Addition”.

When x and +x Are Not Equal

Everybody expects that x == +x, and that is true almost all the time in Python, but I found two cases in the standard library where x != +x.

The first case involves the decimal.Decimal class. You can have x != +x if x is a Decimal instance created in an arithmetic context and +x is then evaluated in a context with different settings. For example, x is calculated in a context with a certain precision, but the precision of the context is changed and then +x is evaluated. See Example 13-2 for a demonstration.

Example 13-2. A change in the arithmetic context precision may cause x to differ from +x

>>> import decimal
>>> ctx = decimal.getcontext()
>>> ctx.prec = 40
>>> one_third = decimal.Decimal('1') / decimal.Decimal('3')
>>> one_third
Decimal('0.3333333333333333333333333333333333333333')
>>> one_third == +one_third
True
>>> ctx.prec = 28
>>> one_third == +one_third
False
>>> +one_third
Decimal('0.3333333333333333333333333333')

Get a reference to the current global arithmetic context.

Set the precision of the arithmetic context to 40.

Compute 1/3 using the current precision.

Inspect the result; there are 40 digits after the decimal point.

one_third == +one_third is True.

Lower precision to 28—the default for Decimal arithmetic in Python 3.4.

Now one_third == +one_third is False.

Inspect +one_third; there are 28 digits after the '.' here.

The fact is that each occurrence of the expression +one_third produces a new Decimal instance from the value of one_third, but using the precision of the current arithmetic context.

The second case where x != +x you can find in the collections.Counter documentation. The Counter class implements several arithmetic operators, including infix + to add the tallies from two Counter instances. However, for practical reasons, Counter addition discards from the result any item with a negative or zero count. And the prefix + is a shortcut for adding an empty Counter, therefore it produces a new Counter preserving only the tallies that are greater than zero. See Example 13-3.

Example 13-3. Unary + produces a new Counter without zeroed or negative tallies

>>> ct = Counter('abracadabra')
>>> ct
Counter({'a': 5, 'r': 2, 'b': 2, 'd': 1, 'c': 1})
>>> ct['r'] = -3
>>> ct['d'] = 0
>>> ct
Counter({'a': 5, 'b': 2, 'c': 1, 'd': 0, 'r': -3})
>>> +ct
Counter({'a': 5, 'b': 2, 'c': 1})

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Overloading + for Vector Addition

Note

The Vector class is a sequence type, and the section “3.3.6. Emulating container types” in the “Data Model” chapter says sequences should support the + operator for concatenation and * for repetition. However, here we will implement + and * as mathematical vector operations, which are a bit harder but more meaningful for a Vector type.

Adding two Euclidean vectors results in a new vector in which the components are the pairwise additions of the components of the addends. To illustrate:

>>> v1 = Vector([3, 4, 5])
>>> v2 = Vector([6, 7, 8])
>>> v1 + v2
Vector([9.0, 11.0, 13.0])
>>> v1 + v2 == Vector([3+6, 4+7, 5+8])
True

What happens if we try to add two Vector instances of different lengths? We could raise an error, but considering practical applications (such as information retrieval), it’s better to fill out the shortest Vector with zeros. This is the result we want:

>>> v1 = Vector([3, 4, 5, 6])
>>> v3 = Vector([1, 2])
>>> v1 + v3
Vector([4.0, 6.0, 5.0, 6.0])

Given these basic requirements, the implementation of __add__ is short and sweet, as shown in Example 13-4.

Example 13-4. Vector.add method, take #1

    # inside the Vector class

    def __add__(self, other):
        pairs = itertools.zip_longest(self, other, fillvalue=0.0)
        return Vector(a + b for a, b in pairs)

pairs is a generator that will produce tuples (a, b) where a is from self, and b is from other. If self and other have different lengths, fillvalue is used to supply the missing values for the shortest iterable.

A new Vector is built from a generator expression producing one sum for each item in pairs.

Note how __add__ returns a new Vector instance, and does not affect self or other.

Warning

Special methods implementing unary or infix operators should never change their operands. Expressions with such operators are expected to produce results by creating new objects. Only augmented assignment operators may change the first operand (self), as discussed in “Augmented Assignment Operators”.

Example 13-4 allows adding Vector to a Vector2d, and Vector to a tuple or to any iterable that produces numbers, as Example 13-5 proves.

Example 13-5. Vector.__add__ take #1 supports non-Vector objects, too

>>> v1 = Vector([3, 4, 5])
>>> v1 + (10, 20, 30)
Vector([13.0, 24.0, 35.0])
>>> from vector2d_v3 import Vector2d
>>> v2d = Vector2d(1, 2)
>>> v1 + v2d
Vector([4.0, 6.0, 5.0])

Both additions in Example 13-5 work because __add__ uses zip_longest(…), which can consume any iterable, and the generator expression to build the new Vector merely performs a + b with the pairs produced by zip_longest(…), so an iterable producing any number items will do.

However, if we swap the operands (Example 13-6), the mixed-type additions fail..

Example 13-6. Vector.__add__ take #1 fails with non-Vector left operands

>>> v1 = Vector([3, 4, 5])
>>> (10, 20, 30) + v1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: can only concatenate tuple (not "Vector") to tuple
>>> from vector2d_v3 import Vector2d
>>> v2d = Vector2d(1, 2)
>>> v2d + v1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'Vector2d' and 'Vector'

To support operations involving objects of different types, Python implements a special dispatching mechanism for the infix operator special methods. Given an expression a + b, the interpreter will perform these steps (also see Figure 13-1):

If a has __add__, call a.__add__(b) and return result unless it’s NotImplemented.

If a doesn’t have __add__, or calling it returns NotImplemented, check if b has __radd__, then call b.__radd__(a) and return result unless it’s NotImplemented.

If b doesn’t have __radd__, or calling it returns NotImplemented, raise TypeError with an unsupported operand types message.

The __radd__ method is called the “reflected” or “reversed” version of __add__. I prefer to call them “reversed” special methods.² Three of this book’s technical reviewers—Alex, Anna, and Leo—told me they like to think of them as the “right” special methods, because they are called on the righthand operand. Whatever “r”-word you prefer, that’s what the “r” prefix stands for in __radd__, __rsub__, and the like.

Figure 13-1. Flowchart for computing a + b with __add__ and __radd__

Therefore, to make the mixed-type additions in Example 13-6 work, we need to implement the Vector.__radd__ method, which Python will invoke as a fall back if the left operand does not implement __add__ or if it does but returns NotImplemented to signal that it doesn’t know how to handle the right operand.

Warning

Do not confuse NotImplemented with NotImplementedError. The first, NotImplemented, is a special singleton value that an infix operator special method should return to tell the interpreter it cannot handle a given operand. In contrast, NotImplementedError is an exception that stub methods in abstract classes raise to warn that they must be overwritten by subclasses.

The simplest possible __radd__ that works is shown in Example 13-7.

Example 13-7. Vector.__add__ and __radd__ methods

    # inside the Vector class

    def __add__(self, other):
        pairs = itertools.zip_longest(self, other, fillvalue=0.0)
        return Vector(a + b for a, b in pairs)

    def __radd__(self, other):
        return self + other

No changes to __add__ from Example 13-4; listed here because __radd__ uses it.

__radd__ just delegates to __add__.

Often, __radd__ can be as simple as that: just invoke the proper operator, therefore delegating to __add__ in this case. This applies to any commutative operator; + is commutative when dealing with numbers or our vectors, but it’s not commutative when concatenating sequences in Python.

The methods in Example 13-4 work with Vector objects, or any iterable with numeric items, such as a Vector2d, a tuple of integers, or an array of floats. But if provided with a noniterable object, __add__ fails with a message that is not very helpful, as in Example 13-8.

Example 13-8. Vector.__add__ method needs an iterable operand

>>> v1 + 1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "vector_v6.py", line 328, in __add__
    pairs = itertools.zip_longest(self, other, fillvalue=0.0)
TypeError: zip_longest argument #2 must support iteration

Another unhelpful message is given if an operand is iterable but its items cannot be added to the float items in the Vector. See Example 13-9.

Example 13-9. Vector.__add__ method needs an iterable with numeric items

>>> v1 + 'ABC'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "vector_v6.py", line 329, in __add__
    return Vector(a + b for a, b in pairs)
  File "vector_v6.py", line 243, in __init__
    self._components = array(self.typecode, components)
  File "vector_v6.py", line 329, in <genexpr>
    return Vector(a + b for a, b in pairs)
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'float' and 'str'

The problems in Examples 13-8 and 13-9 actually go deeper than obscure error messages: if an operator special method cannot return a valid result because of type incompatibility, it should return NotImplemented and not raise TypeError. By returning NotImplemented, you leave the door open for the implementer of the other operand type to perform the operation when Python tries the reversed method call.

In the spirit of duck typing, we will refrain from testing the type of the other operand, or the type of its elements. We’ll catch the exceptions and return NotImplemented. If the interpreter has not yet reversed the operands, it will try that. If the reverse method call returns NotImplemented, then Python will raise TypeError with a standard error message like “unsupported operand type(s) for +: Vector and str.”

The final implementation of the special methods for Vector addition are in Example 13-10.

Example 13-10. vector_v6.py: operator + methods added to vector_v5.py (Example 10-16)

    def __add__(self, other):
        try:
            pairs = itertools.zip_longest(self, other, fillvalue=0.0)
            return Vector(a + b for a, b in pairs)
        except TypeError:
            return NotImplemented

    def __radd__(self, other):
        return self + other

Warning

If an infix operator method raises an exception, it aborts the operator dispatch algorithm. In the particular case of TypeError, it is often better to catch it and return NotImplemented. This allows the interpreter to try calling the reversed operator method, which may correctly handle the computation with the swapped operands, if they are of different types.

At this point, we have safely overloaded the + operator by writing __add__ and __radd__. We will now tackle another infix operator: *.

Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

What does Vector([1, 2, 3]) * x mean? If x is a number, that would be a scalar product, and the result would be a new Vector with each component multiplied by x—also known as an elementwise multiplication:

>>> v1 = Vector([1, 2, 3])
>>> v1 * 10
Vector([10.0, 20.0, 30.0])
>>> 11 * v1
Vector([11.0, 22.0, 33.0])

Another kind of product involving Vector operands would be the dot product of two vectors—or matrix multiplication, if you take one vector as a 1 × N matrix and the other as an N × 1 matrix. The current practice in NumPy and similar libraries is not to overload the * with these two meanings, but to use * only for the scalar product. For example, in NumPy, numpy.dot() computes the dot product.³

Back to our scalar product, again we start with the simplest __mul__ and __rmul__ methods that could possibly work:

    # inside the Vector class

    def __mul__(self, scalar):
        return Vector(n * scalar for n in self)

    def __rmul__(self, scalar):
        return self * scalar

Those methods do work, except when provided with incompatible operands. The scalar argument has to be a number that when multiplied by a float produces another float (because our Vector class uses an array of floats internally). So a complex number will not do, but the scalar can be an int, a bool (because bool is a subclass of int), or even a fractions.Fraction instance.

We could use the same duck typing technique as we did in Example 13-10 and catch a TypeError in __mul__, but there is another, more explicit way that makes sense in this situation: goose typing. We use isinstance() to check the type of scalar, but instead of hardcoding some concrete types, we check against the numbers.Real ABC, which covers all the types we need, and keeps our implementation open to future numeric types that declare themselves actual or virtual subclasses of the numbers.Real ABC. Example 13-11 shows a practical use of goose typing—an explicit check against an abstract type; see the_ Fluent Python_ code repository for the full listing.

Warning

As you may recall from “ABCs in the Standard Library”, decimal.Decimal is not registered as a virtual subclass of numbers.Real. Thus, our Vector class will not handle decimal.Decimal numbers.

Example 13-11. vector_v7.py: operator * methods added

from array import array
import reprlib
import math
import functools
import operator
import itertools
import numbers

class Vector:
    typecode = 'd'

    def __init__(self, components):
        self._components = array(self.typecode, components)

    # many methods omitted in book listing, see vector_v7.py
    # in https://github.com/fluentpython/example-code ...

    def __mul__(self, scalar):
        if isinstance(scalar, numbers.Real):
            return Vector(n * scalar for n in self)
        else:
            return NotImplemented

    def __rmul__(self, scalar):
        return self * scalar

Import the numbers module for type checking.

If scalar is an instance of a numbers.Real subclass, create new Vector with multiplied component values.

Otherwise, return NotImplemented, to let Python try __rmul__ on the scalar operand.

In this example, __rmul__ works fine by just performing self * scalar, delegating to the __mul__ method.

With Example 13-11, we can multiply Vectors by scalar values of the usual and not so usual numeric types:

>>> v1 = Vector([1.0, 2.0, 3.0])
>>> 14 * v1
Vector([14.0, 28.0, 42.0])
>>> v1 * True
Vector([1.0, 2.0, 3.0])
>>> from fractions import Fraction
>>> v1 * Fraction(1, 3)
Vector([0.3333333333333333, 0.6666666666666666, 1.0])

Implementing + and * we saw the most common patterns for coding infix operators. The techniques we described for + and * are applicable to all operators listed in Table 13-1 (the in-place operators will be covered in “Augmented Assignment Operators”).

Table 13-1. Infix operator method names (the in-place operators are used for augmented assignment; comparison operators are in Table 13-2)

Operator
Forward
Reverse
In-place
Description

+

__add__

__radd__

__iadd__

Addition or concatenation

-

__sub__

__rsub__

__isub__

Subtraction

*

__mul__

__rmul__

__imul__

Multiplication or repetition

/

__truediv__

__rtruediv__

__itruediv__

True division

//

__floordiv__

__rfloordiv__

__ifloordiv__

Floor division

%

__mod__

__rmod__

__imod__

Modulo

divmod()

__divmod__

__rdivmod__

__idivmod__

Returns tuple of floor division quotient and modulo

**, pow()

__pow__

__rpow__

__ipow__

Exponentiationa

@

__matmul__

__rmatmul__

__imatmul__

Matrix multiplicationb

&

__and__

__rand__

__iand__

Bitwise and

|

__or__

__ror__

__ior__

Bitwise or

^

__xor__

__rxor__

__ixor__

Bitwise xor

<<

__lshift__

__rlshift__

__ilshift__

Bitwise shift left

>>

__rshift__

__rrshift__

__irshift__

Bitwise shift right

a pow takes an optional third argument, modulo: pow(a, b, modulo), also supported by the special methods when invoked directly (e.g., a.__pow__(b, modulo)).

b New in Python 3.5.

The rich comparison operators are another category of infix operators, using a slightly different set of rules. We cover them in the next main section: “Rich Comparison Operators”.

The following optional sidebar is about the @ operator introduced in Python 3.5—not yet released at the time of this writing.

The New @ Infix Operator in Python 3.5

Python 3.4 does not have an infix operator for the dot product. However, as I write this, Python 3.5 pre-alpha already implements PEP 465 — A dedicated infix operator for matrix multiplication, making the @ sign available for that purpose (e.g., a @ b is the dot product of a and b). The @ operator is supported by the special methods __matmul__, __rmatmul__, and __imatmul__, named for “matrix multiplication.” These methods are not used anywhere in the standard library at this time, but are recognized by the interpreter in Python 3.5 so the NumPy team—and the rest of us—can support the @ operator in user-defined types. The parser was also changed to handle the infix @ (a @ b is a syntax error in Python 3.4).

Just for fun, after compiling Python 3.5 from source, I was able to implement and test the @ operator for the Vector dot product.

These are the simple tests I did:

>>> va = Vector([1, 2, 3])
>>> vz = Vector([5, 6, 7])
>>> va @ vz == 38.0  # 1*5 + 2*6 + 3*7
True
>>> [10, 20, 30] @ vz
380.0
>>> va @ 3
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for @: 'Vector' and 'int'

And here is the code of the relevant special methods:

class Vector:
    # many methods omitted in book listing

    def __matmul__(self, other):
        try:
            return sum(a * b for a, b in zip(self, other))
        except TypeError:
            return NotImplemented

    def __rmatmul__(self, other):
        return self @ other

The full source is in the vector_py3_5.py file in the Fluent Python code repository.

Remember to try it with Python 3.5, otherwise you’ll get a SyntaxError!

Rich Comparison Operators

The handling of the rich comparison operators ==, !=, >, <, >=, <= by the Python interpreter is similar to what we just saw, but differs in two important aspects:

The same set of methods are used in forward and reverse operator calls. The rules are summarized in Table 13-2. For example, in the case of ==, both the forward and reverse calls invoke __eq__, only swapping arguments; and a forward call to __gt__ is followed by a reverse call to __lt__ with the swapped arguments.

In the case of == and !=, if the reverse call fails, Python compares the object IDs instead of raising TypeError.

Table 13-2. Rich comparison operators: reverse methods invoked when the initial method call returns NotImplemented

Group
Infix operator
Forward method call
Reverse method call
Fall back

Equality

a == b

a.__eq__(b)

b.__eq__(a)

Return id(a) == id(b)

a != b

a.__ne__(b)

b.__ne__(a)

Return not (a == b)

Ordering

a > b

a.__gt__(b)

b.__lt__(a)

Raise TypeError

a < b

a.__lt__(b)

b.__gt__(a)

Raise TypeError

a >= b

a.__ge__(b)

b.__le__(a)

Raise TypeError

a <= b

a.__le__(b)

b.__ge__(a)

Raise TypeError

New Behavior in Python 3

The fallback step for all comparison operators changed from Python 2. For __ne__, Python 3 now returns the negated result of __eq__. For the ordering comparison operators, Python 3 raises TypeError with a message like 'unorderable types: int() < tuple()'. In Python 2, those comparisons produced weird results taking into account object types and IDs in some arbitrary way. However, it really makes no sense to compare an int to a tuple, for example, so raising TypeError in such cases is a real improvement in the language.

Given these rules, let’s review and improve the behavior of the Vector.__eq__ method, which was coded as follows in vector_v5.py (Example 10-16):

class Vector:
    # many lines omitted

    def __eq__(self, other):
        return (len(self) == len(other) and
                all(a == b for a, b in zip(self, other)))

That method produces the results in Example 13-12.

Example 13-12. Comparing a Vector to a Vector, a Vector2d, and a tuple

>>> va = Vector([1.0, 2.0, 3.0])
>>> vb = Vector(range(1, 4))
>>> va == vb
True
>>> vc = Vector([1, 2])
>>> from vector2d_v3 import Vector2d
>>> v2d = Vector2d(1, 2)
>>> vc == v2d
True
>>> t3 = (1, 2, 3)
>>> va == t3
True

Two Vector instances with equal numeric components compare equal.

A Vector and a Vector2d are also equal if their components are equal.

A Vector is also considered equal to a tuple or any iterable with numeric items of equal value.

The last one of the results in Example 13-12 is probably not desirable. I really have no hard rule about this; it depends on the application context. But the Zen of Python says:

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

Excessive liberality in the evaluation of operands may lead to surprising results, and programmers hate surprises.

Taking a clue from Python itself, we can see that [1,2] == (1, 2) is False. Therefore, let’s be conservative and do some type checking. If the second operand is a Vector instance (or an instance of a Vector subclass), then use the same logic as the current __eq__. Otherwise, return NotImplemented and let Python handle that. See Example 13-13.

Example 13-13. vector_v8.py: improved __eq__ in the Vector class

    def __eq__(self, other):
        if isinstance(other, Vector):
            return (len(self) == len(other) and
                    all(a == b for a, b in zip(self, other)))
        else:
            return NotImplemented

If the other operand is an instance of Vector (or of a Vector subclass), perform the comparison as before.

Otherwise, return NotImplemented.

If you run the tests in Example 13-12 with the new Vector.__eq__ from Example 13-13, what you get now is shown in Example 13-14.

Example 13-14. Same comparisons as Example 13-12: last result changed

>>> va = Vector([1.0, 2.0, 3.0])
>>> vb = Vector(range(1, 4))
>>> va == vb
True
>>> vc = Vector([1, 2])
>>> from vector2d_v3 import Vector2d
>>> v2d = Vector2d(1, 2)
>>> vc == v2d
True
>>> t3 = (1, 2, 3)
>>> va == t3
False

Same result as before, as expected.

Same result as before, but why? Explanation coming up.

Different result; this is what we wanted. But why does it work? Read on…

Among the three results in Example 13-14, the first one is no news, but the last two were caused by __eq__ returning NotImplemented in Example 13-13. Here is what happens in the example with a Vector and a Vector2d, step by step:

To evaluate vc == v2d, Python calls Vector.__eq__(vc, v2d).

Vector.__eq__(vc, v2d) verifies that v2d is not a Vector and returns NotImplemented.

Python gets NotImplemented result, so it tries Vector2d.__eq__(v2d, vc).

Vector2d.__eq__(v2d, vc) turns both operands into tuples an compares them: the result is True (the code for Vector2d.__eq__ is in Example 9-9).

As for the comparison between Vector and tuple in Example 13-14, the actual steps are:

To evaluate va == t3, Python calls Vector.__eq__(va, t3).

Vector.__eq__(va, t3) verifies that t3 is not a Vector and returns NotImplemented.

Python gets NotImplemented result, so it tries tuple.__eq__(t3, va).

tuple.__eq__(t3, va) has no idea what a Vector is, so it returns NotImplemented.

In the special case of ==, if the reversed call returns NotImplemented, Python compares object IDs as a last resort.

How about !=? We don’t need to implement it because the fallback behavior of the __ne__ inherited from object suits us: when __eq__ is defined and does not return NotImplemented, __ne__ returns that result negated.

In other words, given the same objects we used in Example 13-14, the results for != are consistent:

>>> va != vb
False
>>> vc != v2d
False
>>> va != (1, 2, 3)
True

The __ne__ inherited from object works like the following code—except that the original is written in C:⁴

    def __ne__(self, other):
        eq_result = self == other
        if eq_result is NotImplemented:
            return NotImplemented
        else:
            return not eq_result

Python 3 Documentation Bug

As I write this, the rich comparison method documentation states: “The truth of x==y does not imply that x!=y is false. Accordingly, when defining __eq__(), one should also define __ne__() so that the operators will behave as expected.” That was true for Python 2, but in Python 3 that’s not good advice, because a useful default __ne__ implementation is inherited from the object class, and it’s rarely necessary to override it. The new behavior is documented in Guido’s What’s New in Python 3.0, in the section “Operators And Special Methods.” The documentation bug is recorded as issue 4395.

After covering the essentials of infix operator overloading, let’s turn to a different class of operators: the augmented assignment operators.

Augmented Assignment Operators

Our Vector class already supports the augmented assignment operators += and *=. Example 13-15 shows them in action.

Example 13-15. Augmented assignment works with immutable targets by creating new instances and rebinding

>>> v1 = Vector([1, 2, 3])
>>> v1_alias = v1
>>> id(v1)
4302860128
>>> v1 += Vector([4, 5, 6])
>>> v1
Vector([5.0, 7.0, 9.0])
>>> id(v1)
4302859904
>>> v1_alias
Vector([1.0, 2.0, 3.0])
>>> v1 *= 11
>>> v1
Vector([55.0, 77.0, 99.0])
>>> id(v1)
4302858336

Create alias so we can inspect the Vector([1, 2, 3]) object later.

Remember the ID of the initial Vector bound to v1.

Perform augmented addition.

The expected result…

…but a new Vector was created.

Inspect v1_alias to confirm the original Vector was not altered.

Perform augmented multiplication.

Again, the expected result, but a new Vector was created.

If a class does not implement the in-place operators listed in Table 13-1, the augmented assignment operators are just syntactic sugar: a += b is evaluated exactly as a = a + b. That’s the expected behavior for immutable types, and if you have __add__ then += will work with no additional code.

However, if you do implement an in-place operator method such as __iadd__, that method is called to compute the result of a += b. As the name says, those operators are expected to change the lefthand operand in place, and not create a new object as the result.

Warning

The in-place special methods should never be implemented for immutable types like our Vector class. This is fairly obvious, but worth stating anyway.

To show the code of an in-place operator, we will extend the BingoCage class from Example 11-12 to implement __add__ and __iadd__.

We’ll call the subclass AddableBingoCage. Example 13-16 is the behavior we want for the + operator.

Example 13-16. A new AddableBingoCage instance can be created with

    >>> vowels = 'AEIOU'
    >>> globe = AddableBingoCage(vowels)
    >>> globe.inspect()
    ('A', 'E', 'I', 'O', 'U')
    >>> globe.pick() in vowels
    True
    >>> len(globe.inspect())
    4
    >>> globe2 = AddableBingoCage('XYZ')
    >>> globe3 = globe + globe2
    >>> len(globe3.inspect())
    7
    >>> void = globe + [10, 20]
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      ...
    TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'AddableBingoCage' and 'list'

Create a globe instance with five items (each of the vowels).

Pop one of the items, and verify it is one the vowels.

Confirm that the globe is down to four items.

Create a second instance, with three items.

Create a third instance by adding the previous two. This instance has seven items.

Attempting to add an AddableBingoCage to a list fails with TypeError. That error message is produced by the Python interpreter when our __add__ method returns NotImplemented.

Because an AddableBingoCage is mutable, Example 13-17 shows how it will work when we implement __iadd__.

Example 13-17. An existing AddableBingoCage can be loaded with += (continuing from Example 13-16)

    >>> globe_orig = globe
    >>> len(globe.inspect())
    4
    >>> globe += globe2
    >>> len(globe.inspect())
    7
    >>> globe += ['M', 'N']
    >>> len(globe.inspect())
    9
    >>> globe is globe_orig
    True
    >>> globe += 1
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      ...
    TypeError: right operand in += must be 'AddableBingoCage' or an iterable

Create an alias so we can check the identity of the object later.

globe has four items here.

An AddableBingoCage instance can receive items from another instance of the same class.

The righthand operand of += can also be any iterable.

Throughout this example, globe has always referred to the globe_orig object.

Trying to add a noniterable to an AddableBingoCage fails with a proper error message.

Note that the += operator is more liberal than + with regard to the second operand. With +, we want both operands to be of the same type (AddableBingoCage, in this case), because if we accepted different types this might cause confusion as to the type of the result. With the +=, the situation is clearer: the lefthand object is updated in place, so there’s no doubt about the type of the result.

Tip

I validated the contrasting behavior of + and += by observing how the list built-in type works. Writing my_list + x, you can only concatenate one list to another list, but if you write my_list += x, you can extend the lefthand list with items from any iterable x on the righthand side. This is consistent with how the list.extend() method works: it accepts any iterable argument.

Now that we are clear on the desired behavior for AddableBingoCage, we can look at its implementation in Example 13-18.

Example 13-18. bingoaddable.py: AddableBingoCage extends BingoCage to support + and +=

import itertools

from tombola import Tombola
from bingo import BingoCage

class AddableBingoCage(BingoCage):

    def __add__(self, other):
        if isinstance(other, Tombola):
            return AddableBingoCage(self.inspect() + other.inspect())
        else:
            return NotImplemented

    def __iadd__(self, other):
        if isinstance(other, Tombola):
            other_iterable = other.inspect()
        else:
            try:
                other_iterable = iter(other)
            except TypeError:
                self_cls = type(self).__name__
                msg = "right operand in += must be {!r} or an iterable"
                raise TypeError(msg.format(self_cls))
        self.load(other_iterable)
        return self

PEP 8 — Style Guide for Python Code recommends coding imports from the standard library above imports of your own modules.

AddableBingoCage extends BingoCage.

Our __add__ will only work with an instance of Tombola as the second operand.

Retrieve items from other, if it is an instance of Tombola.

Otherwise, try to obtain an iterator over other.⁵

If that fails, raise an exception explaining what the user should do. When possible, error messages should explicitly guide the user to the solution.

If we got this far, we can load the other_iterable into self.

Very important: augmented assignment special methods must return self.

We can summarize the whole idea of in-place operators by contrasting the return statements that produce results in __add__ and __iadd__ in Example 13-18:

__add__

The result is produced by calling the constructor AddableBingoCage to build a new instance.

__iadd__

The result is produced by returning self, after it has been modified.

To wrap up this example, a final observation on Example 13-18: by design, no __radd__ was coded in AddableBingoCage, because there is no need for it. The forward method __add__ will only deal with righthand operands of the same type, so if Python is trying to compute a + b where a is an AddableBingoCage and b is not, we return NotImplemented—maybe the class of b can make it work. But if the expression is b + a and b is not an AddableBingoCage, and it returns NotImplemented, then it’s better to let Python give up and raise TypeError because we cannot handle b.

Tip

In general, if a forward infix operator method (e.g., __mul__) is designed to work only with operands of the same type as self, it’s useless to implement the corresponding reverse method (e.g., __rmul__) because that, by definition, will only be invoked when dealing with an operand of a different type.

This concludes our exploration of operator overloading in Python.

Chapter Summary

We started this chapter by reviewing some restrictions Python imposes on operator overloading: no overloading of operators in built-in types, and overloading limited to existing operators, except for a few ones (is, and, or, not).

We got down to business with the unary operators, implementing __neg__ and __pos__. Next came the infix operators, starting with +, supported by the __add__ method. We saw that unary and infix operators are supposed to produce results by creating new objects, and should never change their operands. To support operations with other types, we return the NotImplemented special value—not an exception—allowing the interpreter to try again by swapping the operands and calling the reverse special method for that operator (e.g., __radd__). The algorithm Python uses to handle infix operators is summarized in the flowchart in Figure 13-1.

Mixing operand types means we need to detect when we get an operand we can’t handle. In this chapter, we did this in two ways: in the duck typing way, we just went ahead and tried the operation, catching a TypeError exception if it happened; later, in __mul__, we did it with an explicit isinstance test. There are pros and cons to these approaches: duck typing is more flexible, but explicit type checking is more predictable. When we did use isinstance, we were careful to avoid testing with a concrete class, but used the numbers.Real ABC: isinstance(scalar, numbers.Real). This is a good compromise between flexibility and safety, because existing or future user-defined types can be declared as actual or virtual subclasses of an ABC, as we saw in Chapter 11.

The next topic we covered was the rich comparison operators. We implemented == with __eq__ and discovered that Python provides a handy implementation of != in the __ne__ inherited from the object base class. The way Python evaluates these operators along with >, <, >=, and <= is slightly different, with a different logic for choosing the reverse method, and special fallback handling for == and !=, which never generate errors because Python compares the object IDs as a last resort.

In the last section, we focused on augmented assignment operators. We saw that Python handles them by default as a combination of plain operator followed by assignment, that is: a += b is evaluated exactly as a = a + b. That always creates a new object, so it works for mutable or immutable types. For mutable objects, we can implement in-place special methods such as __iadd__ for +=, and alter the value of the lefthand operand. To show this at work, we left behind the immutable Vector class and worked on implementing a BingoCage subclass to support += for adding items to the random pool, similar to the way the list built-in supports += as a shortcut for the list.extend() method. While doing this, we discussed how + tends to be stricter than += regarding the types it accepts. For sequence types, + usually requires that both operands are of the same type, while += often accepts any iterable as the righthand operand.

Further Reading

Operator overloading is one area of Python programming where isinstance tests are common. In general, libraries should leverage dynamic typing—to be more flexible—by avoiding explicit type tests and just trying operations and then handling the exceptions, opening the door for working with objects regardless of their types, as long as they support the necessary operations. But Python ABCs allow a stricter form of duck typing, dubbed “goose typing” by Alex Martelli, which is often useful when writing code that overloads operators. So, if you skipped Chapter 11, make sure to read it.

The main reference for the operator special methods is the “Data Model” chapter. It’s the canonical source, but at this time it’s plagued by that glaring bug mentioned in Python 3 Documentation Bug, advising “when defining __eq__(), one should also define __ne__().” In reality, the __ne__ inherited from the object class in Python 3 covers the vast majority of needs, so implementing __ne__ is rarely necessary in practice. Another relevant reading in the Python documentation is “9.1.2.2. Implementing the arithmetic operations” in the numbers module of The Python Standard Library.

A related technique is generic functions, supported by the @singledispatch decorator in Python 3 (“Generic Functions with Single Dispatch”). In Python Cookbook, 3E (O’Reilly), by David Beazley and Brian K. Jones, “Recipe 9.20. Implementing Multiple Dispatch with Function Annotations” uses some advanced metaprogramming—involving a metaclass—to implement type-based dispatching with function annotations. The second edition of the Python Cookbook by Martelli, Ravenscroft, and Ascher has an interesting recipe (2.13, by Erik Max Francis) showing how to overload the << operator to emulate the C++ iostream syntax in Python. Both books have other examples with operator overloading, I just picked two notable recipes.

The functools.total_ordering function is a class decorator (supported in Python 2.7 and later) that automatically generates methods for all rich comparison operators in any class that defines at least a couple of them. See the functools module docs.

If you are curious about operator method dispatching in languages with dynamic typing, two seminal readings are “A Simple Technique for Handling Multiple Polymorphism” by Dan Ingalls (member of the original Smalltalk team) and “Arithmetic and Double Dispatching in Smalltalk-80” by Kurt J. Hebel and Ralph Johnson (Johnson became famous as one of the authors of the original Design Patterns book). Both papers provide deep insight into the power of polymorphism in languages with dynamic typing, like Smalltalk, Python, and Ruby. Python does not use double dispatching for handling operators as described in those articles. The Python algorithm using forward and reverse operators is easier for user-defined classes to support than double dispatching, but requires special handling by the interpreter. In contrast, classic double dispatching is a general technique you can use in Python or any OO language beyond the specific context of infix operators, and in fact Ingalls, Hebel, and Johnson use very different examples to describe it.

The article “The C Family of Languages: Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling” from which I quoted the epigraph in this chapter, and two other snippets in “Soapbox”, appeared in Java Report, 5(7), July 2000 and C++ Report, 12(7), July/August 2000. It’s an awesome reading if you are into programming language design.

Soapbox

Operator Overloading: Pros and Cons

James Gosling, quoted at the start of this chapter, made the conscious decision to leave operator overloading out when he designed Java. In that same interview (“The C Family of Languages: Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling”) he says:

Probably about 20 to 30 percent of the population think of operator overloading as the spawn of the devil; somebody has done something with operator overloading that has just really ticked them off, because they’ve used like + for list insertion and it makes life really, really confusing. A lot of that problem stems from the fact that there are only about half a dozen operators you can sensibly overload, and yet there are thousands or millions of operators that people would like to define—so you have to pick, and often the choices conflict with your sense of intuition.

Guido van Rossum picked the middle way in supporting operator overloading: he did not leave the door open for users creating new arbitrary operators like <=> or :-), which prevents a Tower of Babel of custom operators, and allows the Python parser to be simple. Python also does not let you overload the operators of the built-in types, another limitation that promotes readability and predictable performance.

Gosling goes on to say:

Then there’s a community of about 10 percent that have actually used operator overloading appropriately and who really care about it, and for whom it’s actually really important; this is almost exclusively people who do numerical work, where the notation is very important to appealing to people’s intuition, because they come into it with an intuition about what the + means, and the ability to say “a + b” where a and b are complex numbers or matrices or something really does make sense.

The notation side of the issue cannot be underestimated. Here is an illustrative example from the realm of finances. In Python, you can compute compound interest using a formula written like this:

interest = principal * ((1 + rate) ** periods - 1)

That same notation works regardless of the numeric types involved. Thus, if you are doing serious financial work, you can make sure that periods is an int, while rate, interest, and principal are exact numbers—instances of the Python decimal.Decimal class — and that formula will work exactly as written.

But in Java, if you switch from float to BigDecimal to get arbitrary precision, you can’t use infix operators anymore, because they only work with the primitive types. This is the same formula coded to work with BigDecimal numbers in Java:

BigDecimal interest = principal.multiply(BigDecimal.ONE.add(rate)
                        .pow(periods).subtract(BigDecimal.ONE));

It’s clear that infix operators make formulas more readable, at least for most of us.⁶ And operator overloading is necessary to support nonprimitive types with infix operator notation. Having operator overloading in a high-level, easy-to-use language was probably a key reason for the amazing penetration of Python in scientific computing in recent years.

Of course, there are benefits to disallowing operator overloading in a language. It is arguably a sound decision for lower-level systems languages where performance and safety are paramount. The much newer Go language followed the lead of Java in this regard and does not support operator overloading.

But overloaded operators, when used sensibly, do make code easier to read and write. It’s a great feature to have in a modern high-level language.

A Glimpse at Lazy Evaluation

If you look closely at the traceback in Example 13-9, you’ll see evidence of the lazy evaluation of generator expressions. Example 13-19 is that same traceback, now with callouts.

Example 13-19. Same as Example 13-9

>>> v1 + 'ABC'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "vector_v6.py", line 329, in __add__
    return Vector(a + b for a, b in pairs)
  File "vector_v6.py", line 243, in __init__
    self._components = array(self.typecode, components)
  File "vector_v6.py", line 329, in <genexpr>
    return Vector(a + b for a, b in pairs)
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'float' and 'str'

The Vector call gets a generator expression as its components argument. No problem at this stage.

The components genexp is passed to the array constructor. Within the array constructor, Python tries to iterate over the genexp, causing the evaluation of the first item a + b. That’s when the TypeError occurs.

The exception propagates to the Vector constructor call, where it is reported.

This shows how the generator expression is evaluated at the latest possible moment, and not where it is defined in the source code.

In contrast, if the Vector constructor was invoked as Vector([a + b for a, b in pairs]), then the exception would happen right there, because the list comprehension tried to build a list to be passed as the argument to the Vector() call. The body of Vector.__init__ would not be reached at all.

Chapter 14 will cover generator expressions in detail, but I did not want to let this accidental demonstration of their lazy nature go unnoticed.

¹ Source: “The C Family of Languages: Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling”.

² The Python documentation uses both terms. The “Data Model” chapter uses “reflected,” but “9.1.2.2. Implementing the arithmetic operations” in the numbers module docs mention “forward” and “reverse” methods, and I find this terminology better, because “forward” and “reversed” clearly name each of the directions, while “reflected” doesn’t have an obvious opposite.

³ The @ sign can be used as an infix dot product operator starting with Python 3.5. More about it in “The New @ Infix Operator in Python 3.5”.

⁴ The logic for object.__eq__ and object.__ne__ is in function object_richcompare in Objects/typeobject.c in the CPython source code.

⁵ The iter built-in function will be covered in the next chapter. Here I could have used tuple(other), and it would work, but at the cost of building a new tuple when all the .load(…) method needs is to iterate over its argument.

⁶ My friend Mario Domenech Goulart, a core developer of the CHICKEN Scheme compiler, will probably disagree with this.

Part V. Control Flow

Chapter 14. Iterables, Iterators, and Generators

When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble. The shape of a program should reflect only the problem it needs to solve. Any other regularity in the code is a sign, to me at least, that I’m using abstractions that aren’t powerful enough—often that I’m generating by hand the expansions of some macro that I need to write.¹

Paul Graham, Lisp hacker and venture capitalist

Iteration is fundamental to data processing. And when scanning datasets that don’t fit in memory, we need a way to fetch the items lazily, that is, one at a time and on demand. This is what the Iterator pattern is about. This chapter shows how the Iterator pattern is built into the Python language so you never need to implement it by hand.

Python does not have macros like Lisp (Paul Graham’s favorite language), so abstracting away the Iterator pattern required changing the language: the yield keyword was added in Python 2.2 (2001).² The yield keyword allows the construction of generators, which work as iterators.

Note

Every generator is an iterator: generators fully implement the iterator interface. But an iterator—as defined in the GoF book—retrieves items from a collection, while a generator can produce items “out of thin air.” That’s why the Fibonacci sequence generator is a common example: an infinite series of numbers cannot be stored in a collection. However, be aware that the Python community treats iterator and generator as synonyms most of the time.

Python 3 uses generators in many places. Even the range() built-in now returns a generator-like object instead of full-blown lists like before. If you must build a list from range, you have to be explicit (e.g., list(range(100))).

Every collection in Python is iterable, and iterators are used internally to support:

for loops

Collection types construction and extension

Looping over text files line by line

List, dict, and set comprehensions

Tuple unpacking

Unpacking actual parameters with * in function calls

This chapter covers the following topics:

How the iter(…) built-in function is used internally to handle iterable objects

How to implement the classic Iterator pattern in Python

How a generator function works in detail, with line-by-line descriptions

How the classic Iterator can be replaced by a generator function or generator expression

Leveraging the general-purpose generator functions in the standard library

Using the new yield from statement to combine generators

A case study: using generator functions in a database conversion utility designed to work with large datasets

Why generators and coroutines look alike but are actually very different and should not be mixed

We’ll get started studying how the iter(…) function makes sequences iterable.

Sentence Take #1: A Sequence of Words

We’ll start our exploration of iterables by implementing a Sentence class: you give its constructor a string with some text, and then you can iterate word by word. The first version will implement the sequence protocol, and it’s iterable because all sequences are iterable, as we’ve seen before, but now we’ll see exactly why.

Example 14-1 shows a Sentence class that extracts words from a text by index.

Example 14-1. sentence.py: A Sentence as a sequence of words

import re
import reprlib

RE_WORD = re.compile('\w+')

class Sentence:

    def __init__(self, text):
        self.text = text
        self.words = RE_WORD.findall(text)

    def __getitem__(self, index):
        return self.words[index]

    def __len__(self):
        return len(self.words)

    def __repr__(self):
        return 'Sentence(%s)' % reprlib.repr(self.text)

re.findall returns a list with all nonoverlapping matches of the regular expression, as a list of strings.

self.words holds the result of .findall, so we simply return the word at the given index.

To complete the sequence protocol, we implement __len__—but it is not needed to make an iterable object.

reprlib.repr is a utility function to generate abbreviated string representations of data structures that can be very large.³

By default, reprlib.repr limits the generated string to 30 characters. See the console session in Example 14-2 to see how Sentence is used.

Example 14-2. Testing iteration on a Sentence instance

>>> s = Sentence('"The time has come," the Walrus said,')
>>> s
Sentence('"The time ha... Walrus said,')
>>> for word in s:
...     print(word)
The
time
has
come
the
Walrus
said
>>> list(s)
['The', 'time', 'has', 'come', 'the', 'Walrus', 'said']

A sentence is created from a string.

Note the output of __repr__ using ... generated by reprlib.repr.

Sentence instances are iterable; we’ll see why in a moment.

Being iterable, Sentence objects can be used as input to build lists and other iterable types.

In the following pages, we’ll develop other Sentence classes that pass the tests in Example 14-2. However, the implementation in Example 14-1 is different from all the others because it’s also a sequence, so you can get words by index:

>>> s[0]
'The'
>>> s[5]
'Walrus'
>>> s[-1]
'said'

Every Python programmer knows that sequences are iterable. Now we’ll see precisely why.

Why Sequences Are Iterable: The iter Function

Whenever the interpreter needs to iterate over an object x, it automatically calls iter(x).

The iter built-in function:

Checks whether the object implements __iter__, and calls that to obtain an iterator.

If __iter__ is not implemented, but __getitem__ is implemented, Python creates an iterator that attempts to fetch items in order, starting from index 0 (zero).

If that fails, Python raises TypeError, usually saying “C object is not iterable,” where C is the class of the target object.

That is why any Python sequence is iterable: they all implement __getitem__. In fact, the standard sequences also implement __iter__, and yours should too, because the special handling of __getitem__ exists for backward compatibility reasons and may be gone in the future (although it is not deprecated as I write this).

As mentioned in “Python Digs Sequences”, this is an extreme form of duck typing: an object is considered iterable not only when it implements the special method __iter__, but also when it implements __getitem__, as long as __getitem__ accepts int keys starting from 0.

In the goose-typing approach, the definition for an iterable is simpler but not as flexible: an object is considered iterable if it implements the __iter__ method. No subclassing or registration is required, because abc.Iterable implements the __subclasshook__, as seen in “Geese Can Behave as Ducks”. Here is a demonstration:

>>> class Foo:
...     def __iter__(self):
...         pass
...
>>> from collections import abc
>>> issubclass(Foo, abc.Iterable)
True
>>> f = Foo()
>>> isinstance(f, abc.Iterable)
True

However, note that our initial Sentence class does not pass the issubclass(Sentence, abc.Iterable) test, even though it is iterable in practice.

Tip

As of Python 3.4, the most accurate way to check whether an object x is iterable is to call iter(x) and handle a TypeError exception if it isn’t. This is more accurate than using isinstance(x, abc.Iterable), because iter(x) also considers the legacy __getitem__ method, while the Iterable ABC does not.

Explicitly checking whether an object is iterable may not be worthwhile if right after the check you are going to iterate over the object. After all, when the iteration is attempted on a noniterable, the exception Python raises is clear enough: TypeError: 'C' object is not iterable . If you can do better than just raising TypeError, then do so in a try/except block instead of doing an explicit check. The explicit check may make sense if you are holding on to the object to iterate over it later; in this case, catching the error early may be useful.

The next section makes explicit the relationship between iterables and iterators.

Iterables Versus Iterators

From the explanation in “Why Sequences Are Iterable: The iter Function” we can extrapolate a definition:

iterable

Any object from which the iter built-in function can obtain an iterator. Objects implementing an __iter__ method returning an iterator are iterable. Sequences are always iterable; as are objects implementing a __getitem__ method that takes 0-based indexes.

It’s important to be clear about the relationship between iterables and iterators: Python obtains iterators from iterables.

Here is a simple for loop iterating over a str. The str 'ABC' is the iterable here. You don’t see it, but there is an iterator behind the curtain:

>>> s = 'ABC'
>>> for char in s:
...     print(char)
...
A
B
C

If there was no for statement and we had to emulate the for machinery by hand with a while loop, this is what we’d have to write:

>>> s = 'ABC'
>>> it = iter(s)
>>> while True:
...     try:
...         print(next(it))
...     except StopIteration:
...         del it
...         break
...
A
B
C

Build an iterator it from the iterable.

Repeatedly call next on the iterator to obtain the next item.

The iterator raises StopIteration when there are no further items.

Release reference to it—the iterator object is discarded.

Exit the loop.

StopIteration signals that the iterator is exhausted. This exception is handled internally in for loops and other iteration contexts like list comprehensions, tuple unpacking, etc.

The standard interface for an iterator has two methods:

__next__

Returns the next available item, raising StopIteration when there are no more items.

__iter__

Returns self; this allows iterators to be used where an iterable is expected, for example, in a for loop.

This is formalized in the collections.abc.Iterator ABC, which defines the __next__ abstract method, and subclasses Iterable—where the abstract __iter__ method is defined. See Figure 14-1.

Figure 14-1. The Iterable and Iterator ABCs. Methods in italic are abstract. A concrete Iterable.__iter__ should return a new Iterator instance. A concrete Iterator must implement __next__. The Iterator.__iter__ method just returns the instance itself.

The Iterator ABC implements __iter__ by doing return self. This allows an iterator to be used wherever an iterable is required. The source code for abc.Iterator is in Example 14-3.

Example 14-3. abc.Iterator class; extracted from Lib/_collections_abc.py

class Iterator(Iterable):

    __slots__ = ()

    @abstractmethod
    def __next__(self):
        'Return the next item from the iterator. When exhausted, raise StopIteration'
        raise StopIteration

    def __iter__(self):
        return self

    @classmethod
    def __subclasshook__(cls, C):
        if cls is Iterator:
            if (any("__next__" in B.__dict__ for B in C.__mro__) and
                any("__iter__" in B.__dict__ for B in C.__mro__)):
                return True
        return NotImplemented

Warning

The Iterator ABC abstract method is it.__next__() in Python 3 and it.next() in Python 2. As usual, you should avoid calling special methods directly. Just use the next(it): this built-in function does the right thing in Python 2 and 3.

The Lib/types.py module source code in Python 3.4 has a comment that says:

# Iterators in Python aren't a matter of type but of protocol.  A large
# and changing number of builtin types implement *some* flavor of
# iterator.  Don't check the type!  Use hasattr to check for both
# "__iter__" and "__next__" attributes instead.

In fact, that’s exactly what the __subclasshook__ method of the abc.Iterator ABC does (see Example 14-3).

Tip

Taking into account the advice from Lib/types.py and the logic implemented in Lib/_collections_abc.py, the best way to check if an object x is an iterator is to call isinstance(x, abc.Iterator). Thanks to Iterator.__subclasshook__, this test works even if the class of x is not a real or virtual subclass of Iterator.

Back to our Sentence class from Example 14-1, you can clearly see how the iterator is built by iter(…) and consumed by next(…) using the Python console:

>>> s3 = Sentence('Pig and Pepper')
>>> it = iter(s3)
>>> it  # doctest: +ELLIPSIS
<iterator object at 0x...>
>>> next(it)
'Pig'
>>> next(it)
'and'
>>> next(it)
'Pepper'
>>> next(it)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
StopIteration
>>> list(it)
[]
>>> list(iter(s3))
['Pig', 'and', 'Pepper']

Create a sentence s3 with three words.

Obtain an iterator from s3.

next(it) fetches the next word.

There are no more words, so the iterator raises a StopIteration exception.

Once exhausted, an iterator becomes useless.

To go over the sentence again, a new iterator must be built.

Because the only methods required of an iterator are __next__ and __iter__, there is no way to check whether there are remaining items, other than to call next() and catch StopInteration. Also, it’s not possible to “reset” an iterator. If you need to start over, you need to call iter(…) on the iterable that built the iterator in the first place. Calling iter(…) on the iterator itself won’t help, because—as mentioned—Iterator.__iter__ is implemented by returning self, so this will not reset a depleted iterator.

To wrap up this section, here is a definition for iterator:

iterator

Any object that implements the __next__ no-argument method that returns the next item in a series or raises StopIteration when there are no more items. Python iterators also implement the __iter__ method so they are iterable as well.

This first version of Sentence was iterable thanks to the special treatment the iter(…) built-in gives to sequences. Now we’ll implement the standard iterable protocol.

Sentence Take #2: A Classic Iterator

The next Sentence class is built according to the classic Iterator design pattern following the blueprint in the GoF book. Note that this is not idiomatic Python, as the next refactorings will make very clear. But it serves to make explicit the relationship between the iterable collection and the iterator object.

Example 14-4 shows an implementation of a Sentence that is iterable because it implements the __iter__ special method, which builds and returns a SentenceIterator. This is how the Iterator design pattern is described in the original Design Patterns book.

We are doing it this way here just to make clear the crucial distinction between an iterable and an iterator and how they are connected.

Example 14-4. sentence_iter.py: Sentence implemented using the Iterator pattern

import re
import reprlib

RE_WORD = re.compile('\w+')

class Sentence:

    def __init__(self, text):
        self.text = text
        self.words = RE_WORD.findall(text)

    def __repr__(self):
        return 'Sentence(%s)' % reprlib.repr(self.text)

    def __iter__(self):
        return SentenceIterator(self.words)

class SentenceIterator:

    def __init__(self, words):
        self.words = words
        self.index = 0

    def __next__(self):
        try:
            word = self.words[self.index]
        except IndexError:
            raise StopIteration()
        self.index += 1
        return word

    def __iter__(self):
        return self

The __iter__ method is the only addition to the previous Sentence implementation. This version has no __getitem__, to make it clear that the class is iterable because it implements __iter__.

__iter__ fulfills the iterable protocol by instantiating and returning an iterator.

SentenceIterator holds a reference to the list of words.

self.index is used to determine the next word to fetch.

Get the word at self.index.

If there is no word at self.index, raise StopIteration.

Increment self.index.

Return the word.

Implement self.__iter__.

The code in Example 14-4 passes the tests in Example 14-2.

Note that implementing __iter__ in SentenceIterator is not actually needed for this example to work, but the it’s the right thing to do: iterators are supposed to implement both __next__ and __iter__, and doing so makes our iterator pass the issubclass(SentenceInterator, abc.Iterator) test. If we had subclassed SentenceIterator from abc.Iterator, we’d inherit the concrete abc.Iterator.__iter__ method.

That is a lot of work (for us lazy Python programmers, anyway). Note how most code in SentenceIterator deals with managing the internal state of the iterator. Soon we’ll see how to make it shorter. But first, a brief detour to address an implementation shortcut that may be tempting, but is just wrong.

Making Sentence an Iterator: Bad Idea

A common cause of errors in building iterables and iterators is to confuse the two. To be clear: iterables have an __iter__ method that instantiates a new iterator every time. Iterators implement a __next__ method that returns individual items, and an __iter__ method that returns self.

Therefore, iterators are also iterable, but iterables are not iterators.

It may be tempting to implement __next__ in addition to __iter__ in the Sentence class, making each Sentence instance at the same time an iterable and iterator over itself. But this is a terrible idea. It’s also a common anti-pattern, according to Alex Martelli who has a lot of experience with Python code reviews.

The “Applicability” section⁴ of the Iterator design pattern in the GoF book says:

Use the Iterator pattern

to access an aggregate object’s contents without exposing its internal representation.

to support multiple traversals of aggregate objects.

to provide a uniform interface for traversing different aggregate structures (that is, to support polymorphic iteration).

To “support multiple traversals” it must be possible to obtain multiple independent iterators from the same iterable instance, and each iterator must keep its own internal state, so a proper implementation of the pattern requires each call to iter(my_iterable) to create a new, independent, iterator. That is why we need the SentenceIterator class in this example.

Warning

An iterable should never act as an iterator over itself. In other words, iterables must implement __iter__, but not __next__.

On the other hand, iterators should always be iterable. An iterator’s __iter__ should just return self.

Now that the classic Iterator pattern is properly demonstrated, we can let it go. The next section presents a more idiomatic implementation of Sentence.

Sentence Take #3: A Generator Function

A Pythonic implementation of the same functionality uses a generator function to replace the SentenceIterator class. A proper explanation of the generator function comes right after Example 14-5.

Example 14-5. sentence_gen.py: Sentence implemented using a generator function

import re
import reprlib

RE_WORD = re.compile('\w+')

class Sentence:

    def __init__(self, text):
        self.text = text
        self.words = RE_WORD.findall(text)

    def __repr__(self):
        return 'Sentence(%s)' % reprlib.repr(self.text)

    def __iter__(self):
        for word in self.words:
            yield word
        return

# done!

Iterate over self.words.

Yield the current word.

This return is not needed; the function can just “fall-through” and return automatically. Either way, a generator function doesn’t raise StopIteration: it simply exits when it’s done producing values.⁵

No need for a separate iterator class!

Here again we have a different implementation of Sentence that passes the tests in Example 14-2.

Back in the Sentence code in Example 14-4, __iter__ called the SentenceIterator constructor to build an iterator and return it. Now the iterator in Example 14-5 is in fact a generator object, built automatically when the __iter__ method is called, because __iter__ here is a generator function.

A full explanation of generator functions follows.

How a Generator Function Works

Any Python function that has the yield keyword in its body is a generator function: a function which, when called, returns a generator object. In other words, a generator function is a generator factory.

Tip

The only syntax distinguishing a plain function from a generator function is the fact that the latter has a yield keyword somewhere in its body. Some argued that a new keyword like gen should be used for generator functions instead of def, but Guido did not agree. His arguments are in PEP 255 — Simple Generators.⁶

Here is the simplest function useful to demonstrate the behavior of a generator:⁷

>>> def gen_123():
...     yield 1
...     yield 2
...     yield 3
...
>>> gen_123  # doctest: +ELLIPSIS
<function gen_123 at 0x...>
>>> gen_123()   # doctest: +ELLIPSIS
<generator object gen_123 at 0x...>
>>> for i in gen_123():
...     print(i)
1
2
3
>>> g = gen_123()
>>> next(g)
1
>>> next(g)
2
>>> next(g)
3
>>> next(g)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
StopIteration

Any Python function that contains the yield keyword is a generator function.

Usually the body of a generator function has loop, but not necessarily; here I just repeat yield three times.

Looking closely, we see gen_123 is a function object.

But when invoked, gen_123() returns a generator object.

Generators are iterators that produce the values of the expressions passed to yield.

For closer inspection, we assign the generator object to g.

Because g is an iterator, calling next(g) fetches the next item produced by yield.

When the body of the function completes, the generator object raises a StopIteration.

A generator function builds a generator object that wraps the body of the function. When we invoke next(…) on the generator object, execution advances to the next yield in the function body, and the next(…) call evaluates to the value yielded when the function body is suspended. Finally, when the function body returns, the enclosing generator object raises StopIteration, in accordance with the Iterator protocol.

Tip

I find it helpful to be strict when talking about the results obtained from a generator: I say that a generator yields or produces values. But it’s confusing to say a generator “returns” values. Functions return values. Calling a generator function returns a generator. A generator yields or produces values. A generator doesn’t “return” values in the usual way: the return statement in the body of a generator function causes StopIteration to be raised by the generator object.⁸

Example 14-6 makes the interaction between a for loop and the body of the function more explicit.

Example 14-6. A generator function that prints messages when it runs

>>> def gen_AB():
...     print('start')
...     yield 'A'
...     print('continue')
...     yield 'B'
...     print('end.')
...
>>> for c in gen_AB():
...     print('-->', c)
...
start
--> A
continue
--> B
end.
>>>

The generator function is defined like any function, but uses yield.

The first implicit call to next() in the for loop at will print 'start' and stop at the first yield, producing the value 'A'.

The second implicit call to next() in the for loop will print 'continue' and stop at the second yield, producing the value 'B'.

The third call to next() will print 'end.' and fall through the end of the function body, causing the generator object to raise StopIteration.

To iterate, the for machinery does the equivalent of g = iter(gen_AB()) to get a generator object, and then next(g) at each iteration.

The loop block prints --> and the value returned by next(g). But this output will be seen only after the output of the print calls inside the generator function.

The string 'start' appears as a result of print('start') in the generator function body.

yield 'A' in the generator function body produces the value A consumed by the for loop, which gets assigned to the c variable and results in the output --> A.

Iteration continues with a second call next(g), advancing the generator function body from yield 'A' to yield 'B'. The text continue is output because of the second print in the generator function body.

yield 'B' produces the value B consumed by the for loop, which gets assigned to the c loop variable, so the loop prints --> B.

Iteration continues with a third call next(it), advancing to the end of the body of the function. The text end. appears in the output because of the third print in the generator function body.

When the generator function body runs to the end, the generator object raises StopIteration. The for loop machinery catches that exception, and the loop terminates cleanly.

Now hopefully it’s clear how Sentence.__iter__ in Example 14-5 works: __iter__ is a generator function which, when called, builds a generator object that implements the iterator interface, so the SentenceIterator class is no longer needed.

This second version of Sentence is much shorter than the first, but it’s not as lazy as it could be. Nowadays, laziness is considered a good trait, at least in programming languages and APIs. A lazy implementation postpones producing values to the last possible moment. This saves memory and may avoid useless processing as well.

We’ll build a lazy Sentence class next.

Sentence Take #4: A Lazy Implementation

The Iterator interface is designed to be lazy: next(my_iterator) produces one item at a time. The opposite of lazy is eager: lazy evaluation and eager evaluation are actual technical terms in programming language theory.

Our Sentence implementations so far have not been lazy because the __init__ eagerly builds a list of all words in the text, binding it to the self.words attribute. This will entail processing the entire text, and the list may use as much memory as the text itself (probably more; it depends on how many nonword characters are in the text). Most of this work will be in vain if the user only iterates over the first couple words.

Whenever you are using Python 3 and start wondering “Is there a lazy way of doing this?”, often the answer is “Yes.”

The re.finditer function is a lazy version of re.findall which, instead of a list, returns a generator producing re.MatchObject instances on demand. If there are many matches, re.finditer saves a lot of memory. Using it, our third version of Sentence is now lazy: it only produces the next word when it is needed. The code is in Example 14-7.

Example 14-7. sentence_gen2.py: Sentence implemented using a generator function calling the re.finditer generator function

import re
import reprlib

RE_WORD = re.compile('\w+')

class Sentence:

    def __init__(self, text):
        self.text = text

    def __repr__(self):
        return 'Sentence(%s)' % reprlib.repr(self.text)

    def __iter__(self):
        for match in RE_WORD.finditer(self.text):
            yield match.group()

No need to have a words list.

finditer builds an iterator over the matches of RE_WORD on self.text, yielding MatchObject instances.

match.group() extracts the actual matched text from the MatchObject instance.

Generator functions are an awesome shortcut, but the code can be made even shorter with a generator expression.

Sentence Take #5: A Generator Expression

Simple generator functions like the one in the previous Sentence class (Example 14-7) can be replaced by a generator expression.

A generator expression can be understood as a lazy version of a list comprehension: it does not eagerly build a list, but returns a generator that will lazily produce the items on demand. In other words, if a list comprehension is a factory of lists, a generator expression is a factory of generators.

Example 14-8 is a quick demo of a generator expression, comparing it to a list comprehension.

Example 14-8. The gen_AB generator function is used by a list comprehension, then by a generator expression

>>> def gen_AB():
...     print('start')
...     yield 'A'
...     print('continue')
...     yield 'B'
...     print('end.')
...
>>> res1 = [x*3 for x in gen_AB()]
start
continue
end.
>>> for i in res1:
...     print('-->', i)
...
--> AAA
--> BBB
>>> res2 = (x*3 for x in gen_AB())
>>> res2
<generator object <genexpr> at 0x10063c240>
>>> for i in res2:
...     print('-->', i)
...
start
--> AAA
continue
--> BBB
end.

This is the same gen_AB function from Example 14-6.

The list comprehension eagerly iterates over the items yielded by the generator object produced by calling gen_AB(): 'A' and 'B'. Note the output in the next lines: start, continue, end.

This for loop is iterating over the res1 list produced by the list comprehension.

The generator expression returns res2. The call to gen_AB() is made, but that call returns a generator, which is not consumed here.

res2 is a generator object.

Only when the for loop iterates over res2, the body of gen_AB actually executes. Each iteration of the for loop implicitly calls next(res2), advancing gen_AB to the next yield. Note the output of gen_AB with the output of the print in the for loop.

So, a generator expression produces a generator, and we can use it to further reduce the code in the Sentence class. See Example 14-9.

Example 14-9. sentence_genexp.py: Sentence implemented using a generator expression

import re
import reprlib

RE_WORD = re.compile('\w+')

class Sentence:

    def __init__(self, text):
        self.text = text

    def __repr__(self):
        return 'Sentence(%s)' % reprlib.repr(self.text)

    def __iter__(self):
        return (match.group() for match in RE_WORD.finditer(self.text))

The only difference from Example 14-7 is the __iter__ method, which here is not a generator function (it has no yield) but uses a generator expression to build a generator and then returns it. The end result is the same: the caller of __iter__ gets a generator object.

Generator expressions are syntactic sugar: they can always be replaced by generator functions, but sometimes are more convenient. The next section is about generator expression usage.

Generator Expressions: When to Use Them

I used several generator expressions when implementing the Vector class in Example 10-16. Each of the methods __eq__, __hash__, __abs__, angle, angles, format, __add__, and __mul__ has a generator expression. In all those methods, a list comprehension would also work, at the cost of using more memory to store the intermediate list values.

In Example 14-9, we saw that a generator expression is a syntactic shortcut to create a generator without defining and calling a function. On the other hand, generator functions are much more flexible: you can code complex logic with multiple statements, and can even use them as coroutines (see Chapter 16).

For the simpler cases, a generator expression will do, and it’s easier to read at a glance, as the Vector example shows.

My rule of thumb in choosing the syntax to use is simple: if the generator expression spans more than a couple of lines, I prefer to code a generator function for the sake of readability.

Syntax Tip

When a generator expression is passed as the single argument to a function or constructor, you don’t need to write a set of parentheses for the function call and another to enclose the generator expression. A single pair will do, like in the Vector call from the __mul__ method in Example 10-16, reproduced here. However, if there are more function arguments after the generator expression, you need to enclose it in parentheses to avoid a SyntaxError:

def __mul__(self, scalar):
    if isinstance(scalar, numbers.Real):
        return Vector(n * scalar for n in self)
    else:
        return NotImplemented

The Sentence examples we’ve seen exemplify the use of generators playing the role of classic iterators: retrieving items from a collection. But generators can also be used to produce values independent of a data source. The next section shows an example of that.

Another Example: Arithmetic Progression Generator

The classic Iterator pattern is all about traversal: navigating some data structure. But a standard interface based on a method to fetch the next item in a series is also useful when the items are produced on the fly, instead of retrieved from a collection. For example, the range built-in generates a bounded arithmetic progression (AP) of integers, and the itertools.count function generates a boundless AP.

We’ll cover itertools.count in the next section, but what if you need to generate a bounded AP of numbers of any type?

Example 14-10 shows a few console tests of an ArithmeticProgression class we will see in a moment. The signature of the constructor in Example 14-10 is ArithmeticProgression(begin, step[, end]). The range() function is similar to the ArithmeticProgression here, but its full signature is range(start, stop[, step]). I chose to implement a different signature because for an arithmetic progression the step is mandatory but end is optional. I also changed the argument names from start/stop to begin/end to make it very clear that I opted for a different signature. In each test in Example 14-10 I call list() on the result to inspect the generated values.

Example 14-10. Demonstration of an ArithmeticProgression class

    >>> ap = ArithmeticProgression(0, 1, 3)
    >>> list(ap)
    [0, 1, 2]
    >>> ap = ArithmeticProgression(1, .5, 3)
    >>> list(ap)
    [1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5]
    >>> ap = ArithmeticProgression(0, 1/3, 1)
    >>> list(ap)
    [0.0, 0.3333333333333333, 0.6666666666666666]
    >>> from fractions import Fraction
    >>> ap = ArithmeticProgression(0, Fraction(1, 3), 1)
    >>> list(ap)
    [Fraction(0, 1), Fraction(1, 3), Fraction(2, 3)]
    >>> from decimal import Decimal
    >>> ap = ArithmeticProgression(0, Decimal('.1'), .3)
    >>> list(ap)
    [Decimal('0.0'), Decimal('0.1'), Decimal('0.2')]

Note that type of the numbers in the resulting arithmetic progression follows the type of begin or step, according to the numeric coercion rules of Python arithmetic. In Example 14-10, you see lists of int, float, Fraction, and Decimal numbers.

Example 14-11 lists the implementation of the ArithmeticProgression class.

Example 14-11. The ArithmeticProgression class

class ArithmeticProgression:

    def __init__(self, begin, step, end=None):
        self.begin = begin
        self.step = step
        self.end = end  # None -> "infinite" series

    def __iter__(self):
        result = type(self.begin + self.step)(self.begin)
        forever = self.end is None
        index = 0
        while forever or result < self.end:
            yield result
            index += 1
            result = self.begin + self.step * index

__init__ requires two arguments: begin and step. end is optional, if it’s None, the series will be unbounded.

This line produces a result value equal to self.begin, but coerced to the type of the subsequent additions.⁹

For readability, the forever flag will be True if the self.end attribute is None, resulting in an unbounded series.

This loop runs forever or until the result matches or exceeds self.end. When this loop exits, so does the function.

The current result is produced.

The next potential result is calculated. It may never be yielded, because the while loop may terminate.

In the last line of Example 14-11, instead of simply incrementing the result with self.step iteratively, I opted to use an index variable and calculate each result by adding self.begin to self.step multiplied by index to reduce the cumulative effect of errors when working with with floats.

The ArithmeticProgression class from Example 14-11 works as intended, and is a clear example of the use of a generator function to implement the __iter__ special method. However, if the whole point of a class is to build a generator by implementing __iter__, the class can be reduced to a generator function. A generator function is, after all, a generator factory.

Example 14-12 shows a generator function called aritprog_gen that does the same job as ArithmeticProgression but with less code. The tests in Example 14-10 all pass if you just call aritprog_gen instead of ArithmeticProgression.¹⁰

Example 14-12. The aritprog_gen generator function

def aritprog_gen(begin, step, end=None):
    result = type(begin + step)(begin)
    forever = end is None
    index = 0
    while forever or result < end:
        yield result
        index += 1
        result = begin + step * index

Example 14-12 is pretty cool, but always remember: there are plenty of ready-to-use generators in the standard library, and the next section will show an even cooler implementation using the itertools module.

Arithmetic Progression with itertools

The itertools module in Python 3.4 has 19 generator functions that can be combined in a variety of interesting ways.

For example, the itertools.count function returns a generator that produces numbers. Without arguments, it produces a series of integers starting with 0. But you can provide optional start and step values to achieve a result very similar to our aritprog_gen functions:

>>> import itertools
>>> gen = itertools.count(1, .5)
>>> next(gen)
1
>>> next(gen)
1.5
>>> next(gen)
2.0
>>> next(gen)
2.5

However, itertools.count never stops, so if you call list(count()), Python will try to build a list larger than available memory and your machine will be very grumpy long before the call fails.

On the other hand, there is the itertools.takewhile function: it produces a generator that consumes another generator and stops when a given predicate evaluates to False. So we can combine the two and write this:

>>> gen = itertools.takewhile(lambda n: n < 3, itertools.count(1, .5))
>>> list(gen)
[1, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5]

Leveraging takewhile and count, Example 14-13 is sweet and short.

Example 14-13. aritprog_v3.py: this works like the previous aritprog_gen functions

import itertools

def aritprog_gen(begin, step, end=None):
    first = type(begin + step)(begin)
    ap_gen = itertools.count(first, step)
    if end is not None:
        ap_gen = itertools.takewhile(lambda n: n < end, ap_gen)
    return ap_gen

Note that aritprog_gen is not a generator function in Example 14-13: it has no yield in its body. But it returns a generator, so it operates as a generator factory, just as a generator function does.

The point of Example 14-13 is: when implementing generators, know what is available in the standard library, otherwise there’s a good chance you’ll reinvent the wheel. That’s why the next section covers several ready-to-use generator functions.

Generator Functions in the Standard Library

The standard library provides many generators, from plain-text file objects providing line-by-line iteration, to the awesome os.walk function, which yields filenames while traversing a directory tree, making recursive filesystem searches as simple as a for loop.

The os.walk generator function is impressive, but in this section I want to focus on general-purpose functions that take arbitrary iterables as arguments and return generators that produce selected, computed, or rearranged items. In the following tables, I summarize two dozen of them, from the built-in, itertools, and functools modules. For convenience, I grouped them by high-level functionality, regardless of where they are defined.

Note

Perhaps you know all the functions mentioned in this section, but some of them are underused, so a quick overview may be good to recall what’s already available.

The first group are filtering generator functions: they yield a subset of items produced by the input iterable, without changing the items themselves. We used itertools.takewhile previously in this chapter, in “Arithmetic Progression with itertools”. Like takewhile, most functions listed in Table 14-1 take a predicate, which is a one-argument Boolean function that will be applied to each item in the input to determine whether the item is included in the output.

Table 14-1. Filtering generator functions

Module
Function
Description

itertools

compress(it, selector_it)

Consumes two iterables in parallel; yields items from it whenever the corresponding item in selector_it is truthy

itertools

dropwhile(predicate, it)

Consumes it skipping items while predicate computes truthy, then yields every remaining item (no further checks are made)

(built-in)

filter(predicate, it)

Applies predicate to each item of iterable, yielding the item if predicate(item) is truthy; if predicate is None, only truthy items are yielded

itertools

filterfalse(predicate, it)

Same as filter, with the predicate logic negated: yields items whenever predicate computes falsy

itertools

islice(it, stop) or islice(it, start, stop, step=1)

Yields items from a slice of it, similar to s[:stop] or s[start:stop:step] except it can be any iterable, and the operation is lazy

itertools

takewhile(predicate, it)

Yields items while predicate computes truthy, then stops and no further checks are made

The console listing in Example 14-14 shows the use of all functions in Table 14-1.

Example 14-14. Filtering generator functions examples

>>> def vowel(c):
...     return c.lower() in 'aeiou'
...
>>> list(filter(vowel, 'Aardvark'))
['A', 'a', 'a']
>>> import itertools
>>> list(itertools.filterfalse(vowel, 'Aardvark'))
['r', 'd', 'v', 'r', 'k']
>>> list(itertools.dropwhile(vowel, 'Aardvark'))
['r', 'd', 'v', 'a', 'r', 'k']
>>> list(itertools.takewhile(vowel, 'Aardvark'))
['A', 'a']
>>> list(itertools.compress('Aardvark', (1,0,1,1,0,1)))
['A', 'r', 'd', 'a']
>>> list(itertools.islice('Aardvark', 4))
['A', 'a', 'r', 'd']
>>> list(itertools.islice('Aardvark', 4, 7))
['v', 'a', 'r']
>>> list(itertools.islice('Aardvark', 1, 7, 2))
['a', 'd', 'a']

The next group are the mapping generators: they yield items computed from each individual item in the input iterable—or iterables, in the case of map and starmap.¹¹ The generators in Table 14-2 yield one result per item in the input iterables. If the input comes from more than one iterable, the output stops as soon as the first input iterable is exhausted.

Table 14-2. Mapping generator functions

Module
Function
Description

itertools

accumulate(it, [func])

Yields accumulated sums; if func is provided, yields the result of applying it to the first pair of items, then to the first result and next item, etc.

(built-in)

enumerate(iterable, start=0)

Yields 2-tuples of the form (index, item), where index is counted from start, and item is taken from the iterable

(built-in)

map(func, it1, [it2, …, itN])

Applies func to each item of it, yielding the result; if N iterables are given, func must take N arguments and the iterables will be consumed in parallel

itertools

starmap(func, it)

Applies func to each item of it, yielding the result; the input iterable should yield iterable items iit, and func is applied as func(*iit)

Example 14-15 demonstrates some uses of itertools.accumulate.

Example 14-15. itertools.accumulate generator function examples

>>> sample = [5, 4, 2, 8, 7, 6, 3, 0, 9, 1]
>>> import itertools
>>> list(itertools.accumulate(sample))
[5, 9, 11, 19, 26, 32, 35, 35, 44, 45]
>>> list(itertools.accumulate(sample, min))
[5, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 0, 0, 0]
>>> list(itertools.accumulate(sample, max))
[5, 5, 5, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 9, 9]
>>> import operator
>>> list(itertools.accumulate(sample, operator.mul))
[5, 20, 40, 320, 2240, 13440, 40320, 0, 0, 0]
>>> list(itertools.accumulate(range(1, 11), operator.mul))
[1, 2, 6, 24, 120, 720, 5040, 40320, 362880, 3628800]

Running sum.

Running minimum.

Running maximum.

Running product.

Factorials from 1! to 10!.

The remaining functions of Table 14-2 are shown in Example 14-16.

Example 14-16. Mapping generator function examples

>>> list(enumerate('albatroz', 1))
[(1, 'a'), (2, 'l'), (3, 'b'), (4, 'a'), (5, 't'), (6, 'r'), (7, 'o'), (8, 'z')]
>>> import operator
>>> list(map(operator.mul, range(11), range(11)))
[0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100]
>>> list(map(operator.mul, range(11), [2, 4, 8]))
[0, 4, 16]
>>> list(map(lambda a, b: (a, b), range(11), [2, 4, 8]))
[(0, 2), (1, 4), (2, 8)]
>>> import itertools
>>> list(itertools.starmap(operator.mul, enumerate('albatroz', 1)))
['a', 'll', 'bbb', 'aaaa', 'ttttt', 'rrrrrr', 'ooooooo', 'zzzzzzzz']
>>> sample = [5, 4, 2, 8, 7, 6, 3, 0, 9, 1]
>>> list(itertools.starmap(lambda a, b: b/a,
...     enumerate(itertools.accumulate(sample), 1)))
[5.0, 4.5, 3.6666666666666665, 4.75, 5.2, 5.333333333333333,
5.0, 4.375, 4.888888888888889, 4.5]

Number the letters in the word, starting from 1.

Squares of integers from 0 to 10.

Multiplying numbers from two iterables in parallel: results stop when the shortest iterable ends.

This is what the zip built-in function does.

Repeat each letter in the word according to its place in it, starting from 1.

Running average.

Next, we have the group of merging generators—all of these yield items from multiple input iterables. chain and chain.from_iterable consume the input iterables sequentially (one after the other), while product, zip, and zip_longest consume the input iterables in parallel. See Table 14-3.

Table 14-3. Generator functions that merge multiple input iterables

Module
Function
Description

itertools

chain(it1, …, itN)

Yield all items from it1, then from it2 etc., seamlessly

itertools

chain.from_iterable(it)

Yield all items from each iterable produced by it, one after the other, seamlessly; it should yield iterable items, for example, a list of iterables

itertools

product(it1, …, itN, repeat=1)

Cartesian product: yields N-tuples made by combining items from each input iterable like nested for loops could produce; repeat allows the input iterables to be consumed more than once

(built-in)

zip(it1, …, itN)

Yields N-tuples built from items taken from the iterables in parallel, silently stopping when the first iterable is exhausted

itertools

zip_longest(it1, …, itN, fillvalue=None)

Yields N-tuples built from items taken from the iterables in parallel, stopping only when the last iterable is exhausted, filling the blanks with the fillvalue

Example 14-17 shows the use of the itertools.chain and zip generator functions and their siblings. Recall that the zip function is named after the zip fastener or zipper (no relation with compression). Both zip and itertools.zip_longest were introduced in “The Awesome zip”.

Example 14-17. Merging generator function examples

>>> list(itertools.chain('ABC', range(2)))
['A', 'B', 'C', 0, 1]
>>> list(itertools.chain(enumerate('ABC')))
[(0, 'A'), (1, 'B'), (2, 'C')]
>>> list(itertools.chain.from_iterable(enumerate('ABC')))
[0, 'A', 1, 'B', 2, 'C']
>>> list(zip('ABC', range(5)))
[('A', 0), ('B', 1), ('C', 2)]
>>> list(zip('ABC', range(5), [10, 20, 30, 40]))
[('A', 0, 10), ('B', 1, 20), ('C', 2, 30)]
>>> list(itertools.zip_longest('ABC', range(5)))
[('A', 0), ('B', 1), ('C', 2), (None, 3), (None, 4)]
>>> list(itertools.zip_longest('ABC', range(5), fillvalue='?'))
[('A', 0), ('B', 1), ('C', 2), ('?', 3), ('?', 4)]

chain is usually called with two or more iterables.

chain does nothing useful when called with a single iterable.

But chain.from_iterable takes each item from the iterable, and chains them in sequence, as long as each item is itself iterable.

zip is commonly used to merge two iterables into a series of two-tuples.

Any number of iterables can be consumed by zip in parallel, but the generator stops as soon as the first iterable ends.

itertools.zip_longest works like zip, except it consumes all input iterables to the end, padding output tuples with None as needed.

The fillvalue keyword argument specifies a custom padding value.

The itertools.product generator is a lazy way of computing Cartesian products, which we built using list comprehensions with more than one for clause in “Cartesian Products”. Generator expressions with multiple for clauses can also be used to produce Cartesian products lazily. Example 14-18 demonstrates itertools.product.

Example 14-18. itertools.product generator function examples

>>> list(itertools.product('ABC', range(2)))
[('A', 0), ('A', 1), ('B', 0), ('B', 1), ('C', 0), ('C', 1)]
>>> suits = 'spades hearts diamonds clubs'.split()
>>> list(itertools.product('AK', suits))
[('A', 'spades'), ('A', 'hearts'), ('A', 'diamonds'), ('A', 'clubs'),
('K', 'spades'), ('K', 'hearts'), ('K', 'diamonds'), ('K', 'clubs')]
>>> list(itertools.product('ABC'))
[('A',), ('B',), ('C',)]
>>> list(itertools.product('ABC', repeat=2))
[('A', 'A'), ('A', 'B'), ('A', 'C'), ('B', 'A'), ('B', 'B'),
('B', 'C'), ('C', 'A'), ('C', 'B'), ('C', 'C')]
>>> list(itertools.product(range(2), repeat=3))
[(0, 0, 0), (0, 0, 1), (0, 1, 0), (0, 1, 1), (1, 0, 0),
(1, 0, 1), (1, 1, 0), (1, 1, 1)]
>>> rows = itertools.product('AB', range(2), repeat=2)
>>> for row in rows: print(row)
...
('A', 0, 'A', 0)
('A', 0, 'A', 1)
('A', 0, 'B', 0)
('A', 0, 'B', 1)
('A', 1, 'A', 0)
('A', 1, 'A', 1)
('A', 1, 'B', 0)
('A', 1, 'B', 1)
('B', 0, 'A', 0)
('B', 0, 'A', 1)
('B', 0, 'B', 0)
('B', 0, 'B', 1)
('B', 1, 'A', 0)
('B', 1, 'A', 1)
('B', 1, 'B', 0)
('B', 1, 'B', 1)

The Cartesian product of a str with three characters and a range with two integers yields six tuples (because 3 * 2 is 6).

The product of two card ranks ('AK'), and four suits is a series of eight tuples.

Given a single iterable, product yields a series of one-tuples, not very useful.

The repeat=N keyword argument tells product to consume each input iterable N times.

Some generator functions expand the input by yielding more than one value per input item. They are listed in Table 14-4.

Table 14-4. Generator functions that expand each input item into multiple output items

Module
Function
Description

itertools

combinations(it, out_len)

Yield combinations of out_len items from the items yielded by it

itertools

combinations_with_replacement(it, out_len)

Yield combinations of out_len items from the items yielded by it, including combinations with repeated items

itertools

count(start=0, step=1)

Yields numbers starting at start, incremented by step, indefinitely

itertools

cycle(it)

Yields items from it storing a copy of each, then yields the entire sequence repeatedly, indefinitely

itertools

permutations(it, out_len=None)

Yield permutations of out_len items from the items yielded by it; by default, out_len is len(list(it))

itertools

repeat(item, [times])

Yield the given item repeadedly, indefinetly unless a number of times is given

The count and repeat functions from itertools return generators that conjure items out of nothing: neither of them takes an iterable as input. We saw itertools.count in “Arithmetic Progression with itertools”. The cycle generator makes a backup of the input iterable and yields its items repeatedly. Example 14-19 illustrates the use of count, repeat, and cycle.

Example 14-19. count, cycle, and repeat

>>> ct = itertools.count()
>>> next(ct)
0
>>> next(ct), next(ct), next(ct)
(1, 2, 3)
>>> list(itertools.islice(itertools.count(1, .3), 3))
[1, 1.3, 1.6]
>>> cy = itertools.cycle('ABC')
>>> next(cy)
'A'
>>> list(itertools.islice(cy, 7))
['B', 'C', 'A', 'B', 'C', 'A', 'B']
>>> rp = itertools.repeat(7)
>>> next(rp), next(rp)
(7, 7)
>>> list(itertools.repeat(8, 4))
[8, 8, 8, 8]
>>> list(map(operator.mul, range(11), itertools.repeat(5)))
[0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50]

Build a count generator ct.

Retrieve the first item from ct.

I can’t build a list from ct, because ct never stops, so I fetch the next three items.

I can build a list from a count generator if it is limited by islice or takewhile.

Build a cycle generator from 'ABC' and fetch its first item, 'A'.

A list can only be built if limited by islice; the next seven items are retrieved here.

Build a repeat generator that will yield the number 7 forever.

A repeat generator can be limited by passing the times argument: here the number 8 will be produced 4 times.

A common use of repeat: providing a fixed argument in map; here it provides the 5 multiplier.

The combinations, combinations_with_replacement, and permutations generator functions—together with product—are called the combinatoric generators in the itertools documentation page. There is a close relationship between itertools.product and the remaining combinatoric functions as well, as Example 14-20 shows.

Example 14-20. Combinatoric generator functions yield multiple values per input item

>>> list(itertools.combinations('ABC', 2))
[('A', 'B'), ('A', 'C'), ('B', 'C')]
>>> list(itertools.combinations_with_replacement('ABC', 2))
[('A', 'A'), ('A', 'B'), ('A', 'C'), ('B', 'B'), ('B', 'C'), ('C', 'C')]
>>> list(itertools.permutations('ABC', 2))
[('A', 'B'), ('A', 'C'), ('B', 'A'), ('B', 'C'), ('C', 'A'), ('C', 'B')]
>>> list(itertools.product('ABC', repeat=2))
[('A', 'A'), ('A', 'B'), ('A', 'C'), ('B', 'A'), ('B', 'B'), ('B', 'C'),
('C', 'A'), ('C', 'B'), ('C', 'C')]

All combinations of len()==2 from the items in 'ABC'; item ordering in the generated tuples is irrelevant (they could be sets).

All combinations of len()==2 from the items in 'ABC', including combinations with repeated items.

All permutations of len()==2 from the items in 'ABC'; item ordering in the generated tuples is relevant.

Cartesian product from 'ABC' and 'ABC' (that’s the effect of repeat=2).

The last group of generator functions we’ll cover in this section are designed to yield all items in the input iterables, but rearranged in some way. Here are two functions that return multiple generators: itertools.groupby and itertools.tee. The other generator function in this group, the reversed built-in, is the only one covered in this section that does not accept any iterable as input, but only sequences. This makes sense: because reversed will yield the items from last to first, it only works with a sequence with a known length. But it avoids the cost of making a reversed copy of the sequence by yielding each item as needed. I put the itertools.product function together with the merging generators in Table 14-3 because they all consume more than one iterable, while the generators in Table 14-5 all accept at most one input iterable.

Table 14-5. Rearranging generator functions

Module
Function
Description

itertools

groupby(it, key=None)

Yields 2-tuples of the form (key, group), where key is the grouping criterion and group is a generator yielding the items in the group

(built-in)

reversed(seq)

Yields items from seq in reverse order, from last to first; seq must be a sequence or implement the __reversed__ special method

itertools

tee(it, n=2)

Yields a tuple of n generators, each yielding the items of the input iterable independently

Example 14-21 demonstrates the use of itertools.groupby and the reversed built-in. Note that itertools.groupby assumes that the input iterable is sorted by the grouping criterion, or at least that the items are clustered by that criterion—even if not sorted.

Example 14-21. itertools.groupby

>>> list(itertools.groupby('LLLLAAGGG'))
[('L', <itertools._grouper object at 0x102227cc0>),
('A', <itertools._grouper object at 0x102227b38>),
('G', <itertools._grouper object at 0x102227b70>)]
>>> for char, group in itertools.groupby('LLLLAAAGG'):
...     print(char, '->', list(group))
...
L -> ['L', 'L', 'L', 'L']
A -> ['A', 'A',]
G -> ['G', 'G', 'G']
>>> animals = ['duck', 'eagle', 'rat', 'giraffe', 'bear',
...            'bat', 'dolphin', 'shark', 'lion']
>>> animals.sort(key=len)
>>> animals
['rat', 'bat', 'duck', 'bear', 'lion', 'eagle', 'shark',
'giraffe', 'dolphin']
>>> for length, group in itertools.groupby(animals, len):
...     print(length, '->', list(group))
...
3 -> ['rat', 'bat']
4 -> ['duck', 'bear', 'lion']
5 -> ['eagle', 'shark']
7 -> ['giraffe', 'dolphin']
>>> for length, group in itertools.groupby(reversed(animals), len):
...     print(length, '->', list(group))
...
7 -> ['dolphin', 'giraffe']
5 -> ['shark', 'eagle']
4 -> ['lion', 'bear', 'duck']
3 -> ['bat', 'rat']
>>>

groupby yields tuples of (key, group_generator).

Handling groupby generators involves nested iteration: in this case, the outer for loop and the inner list constructor.

To use groupby, the input should be sorted; here the words are sorted by length.

Again, loop over the key and group pair, to display the key and expand the group into a list.

Here the reverse generator is used to iterate over animals from right to left.

The last of the generator functions in this group is iterator.tee, which has a unique behavior: it yields multiple generators from a single input iterable, each yielding every item from the input. Those generators can be consumed independently, as shown in Example 14-22.

Example 14-22. itertools.tee yields multiple generators, each yielding every item of the input generator

>>> list(itertools.tee('ABC'))
[<itertools._tee object at 0x10222abc8>, <itertools._tee object at 0x10222ac08>]
>>> g1, g2 = itertools.tee('ABC')
>>> next(g1)
'A'
>>> next(g2)
'A'
>>> next(g2)
'B'
>>> list(g1)
['B', 'C']
>>> list(g2)
['C']
>>> list(zip(*itertools.tee('ABC')))
[('A', 'A'), ('B', 'B'), ('C', 'C')]

Note that several examples in this section used combinations of generator functions. This is a great feature of these functions: because they all take generators as arguments and return generators, they can be combined in many different ways.

While on the subject of combining generators, the yield from statement, new in Python 3.3, is a tool for doing just that.

New Syntax in Python 3.3: yield from

Nested for loops are the traditional solution when a generator function needs to yield values produced from another generator.

For example, here is a homemade implementation of a chaining generator:¹²

>>> def chain(*iterables):
...     for it in iterables:
...         for i in it:
...             yield i
...
>>> s = 'ABC'
>>> t = tuple(range(3))
>>> list(chain(s, t))
['A', 'B', 'C', 0, 1, 2]

The chain generator function is delegating to each received iterable in turn. PEP 380 — Syntax for Delegating to a Subgenerator introduced new syntax for doing that, shown in the next console listing:

>>> def chain(*iterables):
...     for i in iterables:
...         yield from i
...
>>> list(chain(s, t))
['A', 'B', 'C', 0, 1, 2]

As you can see, yield from i replaces the inner for loop completely. The use of yield from in this example is correct, and the code reads better, but it seems like mere syntactic sugar. Besides replacing a loop, yield from creates a channel connecting the inner generator directly to the client of the outer generator. This channel becomes really important when generators are used as coroutines and not only produce but also consume values from the client code. Chapter 16 dives into coroutines, and has several pages explaining why yield from is much more than syntactic sugar.

After this first encounter with yield from, we’ll go back to our review of iterable-savvy functions in the standard library.

Iterable Reducing Functions

The functions in Table 14-6 all take an iterable and return a single result. They are known as “reducing,” “folding,” or “accumulating” functions. Actually, every one of the built-ins listed here can be implemented with functools.reduce, but they exist as built-ins because they address some common use cases more easily. Also, in the case of all and any, there is an important optimization that can’t be done with reduce: these functions short-circuit (i.e., they stop consuming the iterator as soon as the result is determined). See the last test with any in Example 14-23.

Table 14-6. Built-in functions that read iterables and return single values

Module
Function
Description

(built-in)

all(it)

Returns True if all items in it are truthy, otherwise False; all([]) returns True

(built-in)

any(it)

Returns True if any item in it is truthy, otherwise False; any([]) returns False

(built-in)

max(it, [key=,] [default=])

Returns the maximum value of the items in it;a key is an ordering function, as in sorted; default is returned if the iterable is empty

(built-in)

min(it, [key=,] [default=])

Returns the minimum value of the items in it.b key is an ordering function, as in sorted; default is returned if the iterable is empty

functools

reduce(func, it, [initial])

Returns the result of applying func to the first pair of items, then to that result and the third item and so on; if given, initial forms the initial pair with the first item

(built-in)

sum(it, start=0)

The sum of all items in it, with the optional start value added (use math.fsum for better precision when adding floats)

a May also be called as max(arg1, arg2, …, [key=?]), in which case the maximum among the arguments is returned.

b May also be called as min(arg1, arg2, …, [key=?]), in which case the minimum among the arguments is returned.

The operation of all and any is exemplified in Example 14-23.

Example 14-23. Results of all and any for some sequences

>>> all([1, 2, 3])
True
>>> all([1, 0, 3])
False
>>> all([])
True
>>> any([1, 2, 3])
True
>>> any([1, 0, 3])
True
>>> any([0, 0.0])
False
>>> any([])
False
>>> g = (n for n in [0, 0.0, 7, 8])
>>> any(g)
True
>>> next(g)
8

A longer explanation about functools.reduce appeared in “Vector Take #4: Hashing and a Faster ==”.

Another built-in that takes an iterable and returns something else is sorted. Unlike reversed, which is a generator function, sorted builds and returns an actual list. After all, every single item of the input iterable must be read so they can be sorted, and the sorting happens in a list, therefore sorted just returns that list after it’s done. I mention sorted here because it does consume an arbitrary iterable.

Of course, sorted and the reducing functions only work with iterables that eventually stop. Otherwise, they will keep on collecting items and never return a result.

We’ll now go back to the iter() built-in: it has a little-known feature that we haven’t covered yet.

A Closer Look at the iter Function

As we’ve seen, Python calls iter(x) when it needs to iterate over an object x.

But iter has another trick: it can be called with two arguments to create an iterator from a regular function or any callable object. In this usage, the first argument must be a callable to be invoked repeatedly (with no arguments) to yield values, and the second argument is a sentinel: a marker value which, when returned by the callable, causes the iterator to raise StopIteration instead of yielding the sentinel.

The following example shows how to use iter to roll a six-sided dice until a 1 is rolled:

>>> def d6():
...     return randint(1, 6)
...
>>> d6_iter = iter(d6, 1)
>>> d6_iter
<callable_iterator object at 0x00000000029BE6A0>
>>> for roll in d6_iter:
...     print(roll)
...
4
3
6
3

Note that the iter function here returns a callable_iterator. The for loop in the example may run for a very long time, but it will never display 1, because that is the sentinel value. As usual with iterators, the d6_iter object in the example becomes useless once exhausted. To start over, you must rebuild the iterator by invoking iter(…) again.

A useful example is found in the iter built-in function documentation. The following snippet reads lines from a file until a blank line terminated with \n is found; if no such line is present, the for loop will run forever because fp.readline() returns an empty string '' when the end of file is reached:

with open('mydata.txt') as fp:
        for line in iter(fp.readline, '\n'):
            process_line(line)

To close this chapter, I present a practical example of using generators to handle a large volume of data efficiently.

Case Study: Generators in a Database Conversion Utility

A few years ago I worked at BIREME, a digital library run by PAHO/WHO (Pan-American Health Organization/World Health Organization) in São Paulo, Brazil. Among the bibliographic datasets created by BIREME are LILACS (Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences index) and SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), two comprehensive databases indexing the scientific and technical literature produced in the region.

Since the late 1980s, the database system used to manage LILACS is CDS/ISIS, a non-relational, document database created by UNESCO and eventually rewritten in C by BIREME to run on GNU/Linux servers. One of my jobs was to research alternatives for a possible migration of LILACS—and eventually the much larger SciELO—to a modern, open source, document database such as CouchDB or MongoDB.

As part of that research, I wrote a Python script, isis2json.py, that reads a CDS/ISIS file and writes a JSON file suitable for importing to CouchDB or MongoDB. Initially, the script read files in the ISO-2709 format exported by CDS/ISIS. The reading and writing had to be done incrementally because the full datasets were much bigger than main memory. That was easy enough: each iteration of the main for loop read one record from the .iso file, massaged it, and wrote it to the .json output.

However, for operational reasons, it was deemed necessary that isis2json.py supported another CDS/ISIS data format: the binary .mst files used in production at BIREME—to avoid the costly export to ISO-2709.

Now I had a problem: the libraries used to read ISO-2709 and .mst files had very different APIs. And the JSON writing loop was already complicated because the script accepted a variety of command-line options to restructure each output record. Reading data using two different APIs in the same for loop where the JSON was produced would be unwieldy.

The solution was to isolate the reading logic into a pair of generator functions: one for each supported input format. In the end, the isis2json.py script was split into four functions. You can see the main Python 2 script in Example A-5, but the full source code with dependencies is in fluentpython/isis2json on GitHub.

Here is a high-level overview of how the script is structured:

main

The main function uses argparse to read command-line options that configure the structure of the output records. Based on the input filename extension, a suitable generator function is selected to read the data and yield the records, one by one.

iter_iso_records

This generator function reads .iso files (assumed to be in the ISO-2709 format). It takes two arguments: the filename and isis_json_type, one of the options related to the record structure. Each iteration of its for loop reads one record, creates an empty dict, populates it with field data, and yields the dict.

iter_mst_records

This other generator functions reads .mst files.¹³ If you look at the source code for isis2json.py, you’ll see that it’s not as simple as iter_iso_records, but its interface and overall structure is the same: it takes a filename and an isis_json_type argument and enters a for loop, which builds and yields one dict per iteration, representing a single record.

write_json

This function performs the actual writing of the JSON records, one at a time. It takes numerous arguments, but the first one—input_gen—is a reference to a generator function: either iter_iso_records or iter_mst_records. The main for loop in write_json iterates over the dictionaries yielded by the selected input_gen generator, massages it in several ways as determined by the command-line options, and appends the JSON record to the output file.

By leveraging generator functions, I was able to decouple the reading logic from the writing logic. Of course, the simplest way to decouple them would be to read all records to memory, then write them to disk. But that was not a viable option because of the size of the datasets. Using generators, the reading and writing is interleaved, so the script can process files of any size.

Now if isis2json.py needs to support an additional input format—say, MARCXML, a DTD used by the U.S. Library of Congress to represent ISO-2709 data—it will be easy to add a third generator function to implement the reading logic, without changing anything in the complicated write_json function.

This is not rocket science, but it’s a real example where generators provided a flexible solution to processing databases as a stream of records, keeping memory usage low regardless of the amount of data. Anyone who manages large datasets finds many opportunities for using generators in practice.

The next section addresses an aspect of generators that we’ll actually skip for now. Read on to understand why.

Generators as Coroutines

About five years after generator functions with the yield keyword were introduced in Python 2.2, PEP 342 — Coroutines via Enhanced Generators was implemented in Python 2.5. This proposal added extra methods and functionality to generator objects, most notably the .send() method.

Like .__next__(), .send() causes the generator to advance to the next yield, but it also allows the client using the generator to send data into it: whatever argument is passed to .send() becomes the value of the corresponding yield expression inside the generator function body. In other words, .send() allows two-way data exchange between the client code and the generator—in contrast with .__next__(), which only lets the client receive data from the generator.

This is such a major “enhancement” that it actually changes the nature of generators: when used in this way, they become coroutines. David Beazley—probably the most prolific writer and speaker about coroutines in the Python community—warned in a famous PyCon US 2009 tutorial:

Generators produce data for iteration

Coroutines are consumers of data

To keep your brain from exploding, you don’t mix the two concepts together

Coroutines are not related to iteration

Note: There is a use of having yield produce a value in a coroutine, but it’s not tied to iteration.¹⁴

David Beazley, A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency

I will follow Dave’s advice and close this chapter—which is really about iteration techniques—without touching send and the other features that make generators usable as coroutines. Coroutines will be covered in Chapter 16.

Chapter Summary

Iteration is so deeply embedded in the language that I like to say that Python groks iterators.¹⁵ The integration of the Iterator pattern in the semantics of Python is a prime example of how design patterns are not equally applicable in all programming languages. In Python, a classic iterator implemented “by hand” as in Example 14-4 has no practical use, except as a didactic example.

In this chapter, we built a few versions of a class to iterate over individual words in text files that may be very long. Thanks to the use of generators, the successive refactorings of the Sentence class become shorter and easier to read—when you know how they work.

We then coded a generator of arithmetic progressions and showed how to leverage the itertools module to make it simpler. An overview of 24 general-purpose generator functions in the standard library followed.

Following that, we looked at the iter built-in function: first, to see how it returns an iterator when called as iter(o), and then to study how it builds an iterator from any function when called as iter(func, sentinel).

For practical context, I described the implementation of a database conversion utility using generator functions to decouple the reading to the writing logic, enabling efficient handling of large datasets and making it easy to support more than one data input format.

Also mentioned in this chapter were the yield from syntax, new in Python 3.3, and coroutines. Both topics were just introduced here; they get more coverage later in the book.

Further Reading

A detailed technical explanation of generators appears in The Python Language Reference in 6.2.9. Yield expressions. The PEP where generator functions were defined is PEP 255 — Simple Generators.

The itertools module documentation is excellent because of all the examples included. Although the functions in that module are implemented in C, the documentation shows how many of them would be written in Python, often by leveraging other functions in the module. The usage examples are also great: for instance, there is a snippet showing how to use the accumulate function to amortize a loan with interest, given a list of payments over time. There is also an Itertools Recipes section with additional high-performance functions that use the itertools functions as building blocks.

Chapter 4, “Iterators and Generators,” of Python Cookbook, 3E (O’Reilly), by David Beazley and Brian K. Jones, has 16 recipes covering this subject from many different angles, always focusing on practical applications.

The yield from syntax is explained with examples in What’s New in Python 3.3 (see PEP 380: Syntax for Delegating to a Subgenerator). We’ll also cover it in detail in “Using yield from” and “The Meaning of yield from” in Chapter 16.

If you are interested in document databases and would like to learn more about the context of “Case Study: Generators in a Database Conversion Utility”, the Code4Lib Journal—which covers the intersection between libraries and technology—published my paper “From ISIS to CouchDB: Databases and Data Models for Bibliographic Records”. One section of the paper describes the isis2json.py script. The rest of it explains why and how the semistructured data model implemented by document databases like CouchDB and MongoDB are more suitable for cooperative bibliographic data collection than the relational model.

Soapbox

Generator Function Syntax: More Sugar Would Be Nice

Designers need to ensure that controls and displays for different purposes are significantly different from one another.

Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

Source code plays the role of “controls and displays” in programming languages. I think Python is exceptionally well designed; its source code is often as readable as pseudocode. But nothing is perfect. Guido van Rossum should have followed Donald Norman’s advice (previously quoted) and introduced another keyword for defining generator expressions, instead of reusing def. The “BDFL Pronouncements” section of PEP 255 — Simple Generators actually argues:

A “yield” statement buried in the body is not enough warning that the semantics are so different.

But Guido hates introducing new keywords and he did not find that argument convincing, so we are stuck with def.

Reusing the function syntax for generators has other bad consequences. In the paper and experimental work “Python, the Full Monty: A Tested Semantics for the Python Programming Language,” Politz¹⁶ et al. show this trivial example of a generator function (section 4.1 of the paper):

def f(): x=0
    while True:
        x += 1
        yield x

The authors then make the point that we can’t abstract the process of yielding with a function call (Example 14-24).

Example 14-24. “[This] seems to perform a simple abstraction over the process of yielding” (Politz et al.)

def f():
    def do_yield(n):
        yield n
    x = 0
    while True:
        x += 1
        do_yield(x)

If we call f() in Example 14-24, we get an infinite loop, and not a generator, because the yield keyword only makes the immediately enclosing function a generator function. Although generator functions look like functions, we cannot delegate another generator function with a simple function call. As a point of comparison, the Lua language does not impose this limitation. A Lua coroutine can call other functions and any of them can yield to the original caller.

The new yield from syntax was introduced to allow a Python generator or coroutine to delegate work to another, without requiring the workaround of an inner for loop. Example 14-24 can be “fixed” by prefixing the function call with yield from, as in Example 14-25.

Example 14-25. This actually performs a simple abstraction over the process of yielding

def f():
    def do_yield(n):
        yield n
    x = 0
    while True:
        x += 1
        yield from do_yield(x)

Reusing def for declaring generators was a usability mistake, and the problem was compounded in Python 2.5 with coroutines, which are also coded as functions with yield. In the case of coroutines, the yield just happens to appear—usually—on the righthand side of an assignment, because it receives the argument of the .send() call from the client. As David Beazley says:

Despite some similarities, generators and coroutines are basically two different concepts.¹⁷

I believe coroutines also deserved their own keyword. As we’ll see later, coroutines are often used with special decorators, which do set them apart from other functions. But generator functions are not decorated as frequently, so we have to scan their bodies for yield to realize they are not functions at all, but a completely different beast.

It can be argued that, because those features were made to work with little additional syntax, extra syntax would be merely “syntactic sugar.” I happen to like syntactic sugar when it makes features that are different look different. The lack of syntactic sugar is the main reason why Lisp code is hard to read: every language construct in Lisp looks like a function call.

Semantics of Generator Versus Iterator

There are at least three ways of thinking about the relationship between iterators and generators.

The first is the interface viewpoint. The Python iterator protocol defines two methods: __next__ and __iter__. Generator objects implement both, so from this perspective, every generator is an iterator. By this definition, objects created by the enumerate() built-in are iterators:

>>> from collections import abc
>>> e = enumerate('ABC')
>>> isinstance(e, abc.Iterator)
True

The second is the implementation viewpoint. From this angle, a generator is a Python language construct that can be coded in two ways: as a function with the yield keyword or as a generator expression. The generator objects resulting from calling a generator function or evaluating a generator expression are instances of an internal GeneratorType. From this perspective, every generator is also an iterator, because GeneratorType instances implement the iterator interface. But you can write an iterator that is not a generator—by implementing the classic Iterator pattern, as we saw in Example 14-4, or by coding an extension in C. The enumerate objects are not generators from this perspective:

>>> import types
>>> e = enumerate('ABC')
>>> isinstance(e, types.GeneratorType)
False

This happens because types.GeneratorType is defined as “The type of generator-iterator objects, produced by calling a generator function.”

The third is the conceptual viewpoint. In the classic Iterator design pattern—as defined in the GoF book—the iterator traverses a collection and yields items from it. The iterator may be quite complex; for example, it may navigate through a tree-like data structure. But, however much logic is in a classic iterator, it always reads values from an existing data source, and when you call next(it), the iterator is not expected to change the item it gets from the source; it’s supposed to just yield it as is.

In contrast, a generator may produce values without necessarily traversing a collection, like range does. And even if attached to a collection, generators are not limited to yielding just the items in it, but may yield some other values derived from them. A clear example of this is the enumerate function. By the original definition of the design pattern, the generator returned by enumerate is not an iterator because it creates the tuples it yields.

At this conceptual level, the implementation technique is irrelevant. You can write a generator without using a Python generator object. Example 14-26 is a Fibonacci generator I wrote just to make this point.

Example 14-26. fibo_by_hand.py: Fibonacci generator without GeneratorType instances

class Fibonacci:

    def __iter__(self):
        return FibonacciGenerator()

class FibonacciGenerator:

    def __init__(self):
        self.a = 0
        self.b = 1

    def __next__(self):
        result = self.a
        self.a, self.b = self.b, self.a + self.b
        return result

    def __iter__(self):
        return self

Example 14-26 works but is just a silly example. Here is the Pythonic Fibonacci generator:

def fibonacci():
    a, b = 0, 1
    while True:
        yield a
        a, b = b, a + b

And of course, you can always use the generator language construct to perform the basic duties of an iterator: traversing a collection and yielding items from it.

In reality, Python programmers are not strict about this distinction: generators are also called iterators, even in the official docs. The canonical definition of an iterator in the Python Glossary is so general it encompasses both iterators and generators:

Iterator: An object representing a stream of data. […]

The full definition of iterator in the Python Glossary is worth reading. On the other hand, the definition of generator there treats iterator and generator as synonyms, and uses the word “generator” to refer both to the generator function and the generator object it builds. So, in the Python community lingo, iterator and generator are fairly close synonyms.

The Minimalistic Iterator Interface in Python

In the “Implementation” section of the Iterator pattern,¹⁸ the Gang of Four wrote:

The minimal interface to Iterator consists of the operations First, Next, IsDone, and CurrentItem.

However, that very sentence has a footnote which reads:

We can make this interface even smaller by merging Next, IsDone, and CurrentItem into a single operation that advances to the next object and returns it. If the traversal is finished, then this operation returns a special value (0, for instance) that marks the end of the iteration.

This is close to what we have in Python: the single method __next__ does the job. But instead of using a sentinel, which could be overlooked by mistake, the StopIteration exception signals the end of the iteration. Simple and correct: that’s the Python way.

¹ From “Revenge of the Nerds”, a blog post.

² Python 2.2 users could use yield with the directive from __future__ import generators; yield became available by default in Python 2.3.

³ We first used reprlib in “Vector Take #1: Vector2d Compatible”.

⁴ Gamma et. al., Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, p. 259.

⁵ When reviewing this code, Alex Martelli suggested the body of this method could simply be return iter(self.words). He is correct, of course: the result of calling __iter__ would also be an iterator, as it should be. However, I used a for loop with yield here to introduce the syntax of a generator function, which will be covered in detail in the next section.

⁶ Sometimes I add a gen prefix or suffix when naming generator functions, but this is not a common practice. And you can’t do that if you’re implementing an iterable, of course: the necessary special method must be named __iter__.

⁷ Thanks to David Kwast for suggesting this example.

⁸ Prior to Python 3.3, it was an error to provide a value with the return statement in a generator function. Now that is legal, but the return still causes a StopIteration exception to be raised. The caller can retrieve the return value from the exception object. However, this is only relevant when using a generator function as a coroutine, as we’ll see in “Returning a Value from a Coroutine”.

⁹ In Python 2, there was a coerce() built-in function but it’s gone in Python 3, deemed unnecessary because the numeric coercion rules are implicit in the arithmetic operator methods. So the best way I could think of to coerce the initial value to be of the same type as the rest of the series was to perform the addition and use its type to convert the result. I asked about this in the Python-list and got an excellent response from Steven D’Aprano.

¹⁰ The 14-it-generator/ directory in the Fluent Python code repository includes doctests and a script, aritprog_runner.py, which runs the tests against all variations of the aritprog*.py scripts.

¹¹ Here the term “mapping” is unrelated to dictionaries, but has to do with the map built-in.

¹² The itertools.chain from the standard library is written in C.

¹³ The library used to read the complex .mst binary is actually written in Java, so this functionality is only available when isis2json.py is executed with the Jython interpreter, version 2.5 or newer. For further details, see the README.rst file in the repository. The dependencies are imported inside the generator functions that need them, so the script can run even if only one of the external libraries is available.

¹⁴ Slide 33, “Keeping It Straight,” in “A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency”.

¹⁵ According to the Jargon file, to grok is not merely to learn something, but to absorb it so “it becomes part of you, part of your identity.”

¹⁶ Joe Gibbs Politz, Alejandro Martinez, Matthew Milano, Sumner Warren, Daniel Patterson, Junsong Li, Anand Chitipothu, and Shriram Krishnamurthi, “Python: The Full Monty,” SIGPLAN Not. 48, 10 (October 2013), 217-232.

¹⁷ Slide 31, “A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency”.

¹⁸ Gamma et. al., Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, p. 261.

Chapter 15. Context Managers and else Blocks

Context managers may end up being almost as important as the subroutine itself. We’ve only scratched the surface with them. […] Basic has a with statement, there are with statements in lots of languages. But they don’t do the same thing, they all do something very shallow, they save you from repeated dotted [attribute] lookups, they don’t do setup and tear down. Just because it’s the same name don’t think it’s the same thing. The with statement is a very big deal.¹

Raymond Hettinger, Eloquent Python evangelist

In this chapter, we will discuss control flow features that are not so common in other languages, and for this reason tend to be overlooked or underused in Python. They are:

The with statement and context managers

The else clause in for, while, and try statements

The with statement sets up a temporary context and reliably tears it down, under the control of a context manager object. This prevents errors and reduces boilerplate code, making APIs at the same time safer and easier to use. Python programmers are finding lots of uses for with blocks beyond automatic file closing.

The else clause is completely unrelated to with. But this is Part V, and I couldn’t find another place for covering else, and I wouldn’t have a one-page chapter about it, so here it is.

Let’s review the smaller topic to get to the real substance of this chapter.

Do This, Then That: else Blocks Beyond if

This is no secret, but it is an underappreciated language feature: the else clause can be used not only in if statements but also in for, while, and try statements.

The semantics of for/else, while/else, and try/else are closely related, but very different from if/else. Initially the word else actually hindered my understanding of these features, but eventually I got used to it.

Here are the rules:

for

The else block will run only if and when the for loop runs to completion (i.e., not if the for is aborted with a break).

while

The else block will run only if and when the while loop exits because the condition became falsy (i.e., not when the while is aborted with a break).

try

The else block will only run if no exception is raised in the try block. The official docs also state: “Exceptions in the else clause are not handled by the preceding except clauses.”

In all cases, the else clause is also skipped if an exception or a return, break, or continue statement causes control to jump out of the main block of the compound statement.

Note

I think else is a very poor choice for the keyword in all cases except if. It implies an excluding alternative, like “Run this loop, otherwise do that,” but the semantics for else in loops is the opposite: “Run this loop, then do that.” This suggests then as a better keyword—which would also make sense in the try context: “Try this, then do that.” However, adding a new keyword is a breaking change to the language, and Guido avoids it like the plague.

Using else with these statements often makes the code easier to read and saves the trouble of setting up control flags or adding extra if statements.

The use of else in loops generally follows the pattern of this snippet:

for item in my_list:
    if item.flavor == 'banana':
        break
else:
    raise ValueError('No banana flavor found!')

In the case of try/except blocks, else may seem redundant at first. After all, the after_call() in the following snippet will run only if the dangerous_call() does not raise an exception, correct?

try:
    dangerous_call()
    after_call()
except OSError:
    log('OSError...')

However, doing so puts the after_call() inside the try block for no good reason. For clarity and correctness, the body of a try block should only have the statements that may generate the expected exceptions. This is much better:

try:
    dangerous_call()
except OSError:
    log('OSError...')
else:
    after_call()

Now it’s clear that the try block is guarding against possible errors in dangerous_call() and not in after_call(). It’s also more obvious that after_call() will only execute if no exceptions are raised in the try block.

In Python, try/except is commonly used for control flow, and not just for error handling. There’s even an acronym/slogan for that documented in the official Python glossary:

EAFP

Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. This common Python coding style assumes the existence of valid keys or attributes and catches exceptions if the assumption proves false. This clean and fast style is characterized by the presence of many try and except statements. The technique contrasts with the LBYL style common to many other languages such as C.

The glossary then defines LBYL:

LBYL

Look before you leap. This coding style explicitly tests for pre-conditions before making calls or lookups. This style contrasts with the EAFP approach and is characterized by the presence of many if statements. In a multi-threaded environment, the LBYL approach can risk introducing a race condition between “the looking” and “the leaping”. For example, the code, if key in mapping: return mapping[key] can fail if another thread removes key from mapping after the test, but before the lookup. This issue can be solved with locks or by using the EAFP approach.

Given the EAFP style, it makes even more sense to know and use well else blocks in try/except statements.

Now let’s address the main topic of this chapter: the powerful with statement.

Context Managers and with Blocks

Context manager objects exist to control a with statement, just like iterators exist to control a for statement.

The with statement was designed to simplify the try/finally pattern, which guarantees that some operation is performed after a block of code, even if the block is aborted because of an exception, a return or sys.exit() call. The code in the finally clause usually releases a critical resource or restores some previous state that was temporarily changed.

The context manager protocol consists of the __enter__ and __exit__ methods. At the start of the with, __enter__ is invoked on the context manager object. The role of the finally clause is played by a call to __exit__ on the context manager object at the end of the with block.

The most common example is making sure a file object is closed. See Example 15-1 for a detailed demonstration of using with to close a file.

Example 15-1. Demonstration of a file object as a context manager

>>> with open('mirror.py') as fp:
...     src = fp.read(60)
...
>>> len(src)
60
>>> fp
<_io.TextIOWrapper name='mirror.py' mode='r' encoding='UTF-8'>
>>> fp.closed, fp.encoding
(True, 'UTF-8')
>>> fp.read(60)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: I/O operation on closed file.

fp is bound to the opened file because the file’s __enter__ method returns self.

Read some data from fp.

The fp variable is still available.²

You can read the attributes of the fp object.

But you can’t perform I/O with fp because at the end of the with block, the TextIOWrapper.__exit__ method is called and closes the file.

The first callout in Example 15-1 makes a subtle but crucial point: the context manager object is the result of evaluating the expression after with, but the value bound to the target variable (in the as clause) is the result of calling __enter__ on the context manager object.

It just happens that in Example 15-1, the open() function returns an instance of TextIOWrapper, and its __enter__ method returns self. But the __enter__ method may also return some other object instead of the context manager.

When control flow exits the with block in any way, the __exit__ method is invoked on the context manager object, not on whatever is returned by __enter__.

The as clause of the with statement is optional. In the case of open, you’ll always need it to get a reference to the file, but some context managers return None because they have no useful object to give back to the user.

Example 15-2 shows the operation of a perfectly frivolous context manager designed to highlight the distinction between the context manager and the object returned by its __enter__ method.

Example 15-2. Test driving the LookingGlass context manager class

    >>> from mirror import LookingGlass
    >>> with LookingGlass() as what:
    ...      print('Alice, Kitty and Snowdrop')
    ...      print(what)
    ...
    pordwonS dna yttiK ,ecilA
    YKCOWREBBAJ
    >>> what
    'JABBERWOCKY'
    >>> print('Back to normal.')
    Back to normal.

The context manager is an instance of LookingGlass; Python calls __enter__ on the context manager and the result is bound to what.

Print a str, then the value of the target variable what.

The output of each print comes out backward.

Now the with block is over. We can see that the value returned by __enter__, held in what, is the string 'JABBERWOCKY'.

Program output is no longer backward.

Example 15-3 shows the implementation of LookingGlass.

Example 15-3. mirror.py: code for the LookingGlass context manager class

class LookingGlass:

    def __enter__(self):
        import sys
        self.original_write = sys.stdout.write
        sys.stdout.write = self.reverse_write
        return 'JABBERWOCKY'

    def reverse_write(self, text):
        self.original_write(text[::-1])

    def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_value, traceback):
        import sys
        sys.stdout.write = self.original_write
        if exc_type is ZeroDivisionError:
            print('Please DO NOT divide by zero!')
            return True

Python invokes __enter__ with no arguments besides self.

Hold the original sys.stdout.write method in an instance attribute for later use.

Monkey-patch sys.stdout.write, replacing it with our own method.

Return the 'JABBERWOCKY' string just so we have something to put in the target variable what.

Our replacement to sys.stdout.write reverses the text argument and calls the original implementation.

Python calls __exit__ with None, None, None if all went well; if an exception is raised, the three arguments get the exception data, as described next.

It’s cheap to import modules again because Python caches them.

Restore the original method to sys.stdout.write.

If the exception is not None and its type is ZeroDivisionError, print a message…

…and return True to tell the interpreter that the exception was handled.

If __exit__ returns None or anything but True, any exception raised in the with block will be propagated.

Tip

When real applications take over standard output, they often want to replace sys.stdout with another file-like object for a while, then switch back to the original. The contextlib.redirect_stdout context manager does exactly that: just pass it the file-like object that will stand in for sys.stdout.

The interpreter calls the __enter__ method with no arguments—beyond the implicit self. The three arguments passed to __exit__ are:

exc_type

The exception class (e.g., ZeroDivisionError).

exc_value

The exception instance. Sometimes, parameters passed to the exception constructor—such as the error message—can be found in exc_value.args.

traceback

A traceback object.³

For a detailed look at how a context manager works, see Example 15-4, where LookingGlass is used outside of a with block, so we can manually call its __enter__ and __exit__ methods.

Example 15-4. Exercising LookingGlass without a with block

    >>> from mirror import LookingGlass
    >>> manager = LookingGlass()
    >>> manager
    <mirror.LookingGlass object at 0x2a578ac>
    >>> monster = manager.__enter__()
    >>> monster == 'JABBERWOCKY'
    eurT
    >>> monster
    'YKCOWREBBAJ'
    >>> manager
    >ca875a2x0 ta tcejbo ssalGgnikooL.rorrim<
    >>> manager.__exit__(None, None, None)
    >>> monster
    'JABBERWOCKY'

Instantiate and inspect the manager instance.

Call the context manager __enter__() method and store result in monster.

Monster is the string 'JABBERWOCKY'. The True identifier appears reversed because all output via stdout goes through the write method we patched in __enter__.

Call manager.__exit__ to restore previous stdout.write.

Context managers are a fairly novel feature and slowly but surely the Python community is finding new, creative uses for them. Some examples from the standard library are:

Managing transactions in the sqlite3 module; see “12.6.7.3. Using the connection as a context manager”.

Holding locks, conditions, and semaphores in threading code; see “17.1.10. Using locks, conditions, and semaphores in the with statement”.

Setting up environments for arithmetic operations with Decimal objects; see the decimal.localcontext documentation.

Applying temporary patches to objects for testing; see the unittest.mock.patch function.

The standard library also includes the contextlib utilities, covered next.

The contextlib Utilities

Before rolling your own context manager classes, take a look at “29.6 contextlib — Utilities for with-statement contexts” in The Python Standard Library. Besides the already mentioned redirect_stdout, the contextlib module includes classes and other functions that are more widely applicable:

closing

A function to build context managers out of objects that provide a close() method but don’t implement the __enter__/__exit__ protocol.

suppress

A context manager to temporarily ignore specified exceptions.

@contextmanager

A decorator that lets you build a context manager from a simple generator function, instead of creating a class and implementing the protocol.

ContextDecorator

A base class for defining class-based context managers that can also be used as function decorators, running the entire function within a managed context.

ExitStack

A context manager that lets you enter a variable number of context managers. When the with block ends, ExitStack calls the stacked context managers’ __exit__ methods in LIFO order (last entered, first exited). Use this class when you don’t know beforehand how many context managers you need to enter in your with block; for example, when opening all files from an arbitrary list of files at the same time.

The most widely used of these utilities is surely the @contextmanager decorator, so it deserves more attention. That decorator is also intriguing because it shows a use for the yield statement unrelated to iteration. This paves the way to the concept of a coroutine, the theme of the next chapter.

Using @contextmanager

The @contextmanager decorator reduces the boilerplate of creating a context manager: instead of writing a whole class with __enter__/__exit__ methods, you just implement a generator with a single yield that should produce whatever you want the __enter__ method to return.

In a generator decorated with @contextmanager, yield is used to split the body of the function in two parts: everything before the yield will be executed at the beginning of the with block when the interpreter calls __enter__; the code after yield will run when __exit__ is called at the end of the block.

Here is an example. Example 15-5 replaces the LookingGlass class from Example 15-3 with a generator function.

Example 15-5. mirror_gen.py: a context manager implemented with a generator

import contextlib

@contextlib.contextmanager
def looking_glass():
    import sys
    original_write = sys.stdout.write

    def reverse_write(text):
        original_write(text[::-1])

    sys.stdout.write = reverse_write
    yield 'JABBERWOCKY'
    sys.stdout.write = original_write

Apply the contextmanager decorator.

Preserve original sys.stdout.write method.

Define custom reverse_write function; original_write will be available in the closure.

Replace sys.stdout.write with reverse_write.

Yield the value that will be bound to the target variable in the as clause of the with statement. This function pauses at this point while the body of the with executes.

When control exits the with block in any way, execution continues after the yield; here the original sys.stdout.write is restored.

Example 15-6 shows the looking_glass function in operation.

Example 15-6. Test driving the looking_glass context manager function

    >>> from mirror_gen import looking_glass
    >>> with looking_glass() as what:
    ...      print('Alice, Kitty and Snowdrop')
    ...      print(what)
    ...
    pordwonS dna yttiK ,ecilA
    YKCOWREBBAJ
    >>> what
    'JABBERWOCKY'

The only difference from Example 15-2 is the name of the context manager: looking_glass instead of LookingGlass.

Essentially the contextlib.contextmanager decorator wraps the function in a class that implements the __enter__ and __exit__ methods.⁴

The __enter__ method of that class:

Invokes the generator function and holds on to the generator object—let’s call it gen.

Calls next(gen) to make it run to the yield keyword.

Returns the value yielded by next(gen), so it can be bound to a target variable in the with/as form.

When the with block terminates, the __exit__ method:

Checks an exception was passed as exc_type; if so, gen.throw(exception) is invoked, causing the exception to be raised in the yield line inside the generator function body.

Otherwise, next(gen) is called, resuming the execution of the generator function body after the yield.

Example 15-5 has a serious flaw: if an exception is raised in the body of the with block, the Python interpreter will catch it and raise it again in the yield expression inside looking_glass. But there is no error handling there, so the looking_glass function will abort without ever restoring the original sys.stdout.write method, leaving the system in an invalid state.

Example 15-7 adds special handling of the ZeroDivisionError exception, making it functionally equivalent to the class-based Example 15-3.

Example 15-7. mirror_gen_exc.py: generator-based context manager implementing exception handling—same external behavior as Example 15-3

import contextlib

@contextlib.contextmanager
def looking_glass():
    import sys
    original_write = sys.stdout.write

    def reverse_write(text):
        original_write(text[::-1])

    sys.stdout.write = reverse_write
    msg = ''
    try:
        yield 'JABBERWOCKY'
    except ZeroDivisionError:
        msg = 'Please DO NOT divide by zero!'
    finally:
        sys.stdout.write = original_write
        if msg:
            print(msg)

Create a variable for a possible error message; this is the first change in relation to Example 15-5.

Handle ZeroDivisionError by setting an error message.

Undo monkey-patching of sys.stdout.write.

Display error message, if it was set.

Recall that the __exit__ method tells the interpreter that it has handled the exception by returning True; in that case, the interpreter suppresses the exception. On the other hand, if __exit__ does not explicitly return a value, the interpreter gets the usual None, and propagates the exception. With @contextmanager, the default behavior is inverted: the __exit__ method provided by the decorator assumes any exception sent into the generator is handled and should be suppressed.⁵ You must explicitly re-raise an exception in the decorated function if you don’t want @contextmanager to suppress it.⁶

Tip

Having a try/finally (or a with block) around the yield is an unavoidable price of using @contextmanager, because you never know what the users of your context manager are going to do inside their with block.⁷

An interesting real-life example of @contextmanager outside of the standard library is Martijn Pieters’ in-place file rewriting context manager. Example 15-8 shows how it’s used.

Example 15-8. A context manager for rewriting files in place

import csv

with inplace(csvfilename, 'r', newline='') as (infh, outfh):
    reader = csv.reader(infh)
    writer = csv.writer(outfh)

    for row in reader:
        row += ['new', 'columns']
        writer.writerow(row)

The inplace function is a context manager that gives you two handles—infh and outfh in the example—to the same file, allowing your code to read and write to it at the same time. It’s easier to use than the standard library’s fileinput.input function (which also provides a context manager, by the way).

If you want to study Martijn’s inplace source code (listed in the post), find the yield keyword: everything before it deals with setting up the context, which entails creating a backup file, then opening and yielding references to the readable and writable file handles that will be returned by the __enter__ call. The __exit__ processing after the yield closes the file handles and restores the file from the backup if something went wrong.

Note that the use of yield in a generator used with the @contextmanager decorator has nothing to do with iteration. In the examples shown in this section, the generator function is operating more like a coroutine: a procedure that runs up to a point, then suspends to let the client code run until the client wants the coroutine to proceed with its job. Chapter 16 is all about coroutines.

Chapter Summary

This chapter started easily enough with discussion of else blocks in for, while, and try statements. Once you get used to the peculiar meaning of the else clause in these statements, I believe else can clarify your intentions.

We then covered context managers and the meaning of the with statement, quickly moving beyond its common use to automatically close opened files. We implemented a custom context manager: the LookingGlass class with the __enter__/__exit__ methods, and saw how to handle exceptions in the __exit__ method. A key point that Raymond Hettinger made in his PyCon US 2013 keynote is that with is not just for resource management, but it’s a tool for factoring out common setup and teardown code, or any pair of operations that need to be done before and after another procedure (slide 21, What Makes Python Awesome?).

Finally, we reviewed functions in the contextlib standard library module. One of them, the @contextmanager decorator, makes it possible to implement a context manager using a simple generator with one yield—a leaner solution than coding a class with at least two methods. We reimplemented the LookingGlass as a looking_glass generator function, and discussed how to do exception handling when using @contextmanager.

The @contextmanager decorator is an elegant and practical tool that brings together three distinctive Python features: a function decorator, a generator, and the with statement.

Further Reading

Chapter 8, “Compound Statements,” in The Python Language Reference says pretty much everything there is to say about else clauses in if, for, while, and try statements. Regarding Pythonic usage of try/except, with or without else, Raymond Hettinger has a brilliant answer to the question “Is it a good practice to use try-except-else in Python?” in StackOverflow. Alex Martelli’s Python in a Nutshell, 2E (O’Reilly), has a chapter about exceptions with an excellent discussion of the EAFP style, crediting computing pioneer Grace Hopper for coining the phrase “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.”

The Python Standard Library, Chapter 4, “Built-in Types,” has a section devoted to Context Manager Types. The __enter__/__exit__ special methods are also documented in The Python Language Reference in “3.3.8. With Statement Context Managers”. Context managers were introduced in PEP 343 — The “with” Statement. This PEP is not easy reading because it spends a lot of time covering corner cases and arguing against alternative proposals. That’s the nature of PEPs.

Raymond Hettinger highlighted the with statement as a “winning language feature” in his PyCon US 2013 keynote. He also showed some interesting applications of context managers in his talk “Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python” at the same conference.

Jeff Preshing’ blog post “The Python with Statement by Example” is interesting for the examples using context managers with the pycairo graphics library.

Beazley and Jones devised context managers for very different purposes in their Python Cookbook, 3E (O’Reilly). “Recipe 8.3. Making Objects Support the Context-Management Protocol” implements a LazyConnection class whose instances are context managers that open and close network connections automatically in with blocks. “Recipe 9.22. Defining Context Managers the Easy Way” introduces a context manager for timing code, and another for making transactional changes to a list object: within the with block, a working copy of the list instance is made, and all changes are applied to that working copy. Only when the with block completes without an exception, the working copy replaces the original list. Simple and ingenious.

Soapbox

Factoring Out the Bread

In his PyCon US 2013 keynote, “What Makes Python Awesome,” Raymond Hettinger says when he first saw the with statement proposal he thought it was “a little bit arcane.” Initially, I had a similar reaction. PEPs are often hard to read, and PEP 343 is typical in that regard.

Then—Hettinger told us—he had an insight: subroutines are the most important invention in the history of computer languages. If you have sequences of operations like A;B;C and P;B;Q, you can factor out B in a subroutine. It’s like factoring out the filling in a sandwich: using tuna with different breads. But what if you want to factor out the bread, to make sandwiches with wheat bread, using a different filling each time? That’s what the with statement offers. It’s the complement of the subroutine. Hettinger went on to say:

The with statement is a very big deal. I encourage you to go out and take this tip of the iceberg and drill deeper. You can probably do profound things with the with statement. The best uses of it have not been discovered yet. I expect that if you make good use of it, it will be copied into other languages and all future languages will have it. You can be part of discovering something almost as profound as the invention of the subroutine itself.

Hettinger admits he is overselling the with statement. Nevertheless, it is a very useful feature. When he used the sandwich analogy to explain how with is the complement to the subroutine, many possibilities opened up in my mind.

If you need to convince anyone that Python is awesome, you should watch Hettinger’s keynote. The bit about context managers is from 23:00 to 26:15. But the entire keynote is excellent.

¹ PyCon US 2013 keynote: “What Makes Python Awesome”; the part about with starts at 23:00 and ends at 26:15.

² with blocks don’t define a new scope, as functions and modules do.

³ The three arguments received by self are exactly what you get if you call sys.exc_info() in the finally block of a try/finally statement. This makes sense, considering that the with statement is meant to replace most uses of try/finally, and calling sys.exc_info() was often necessary to determine what clean-up action would be required.

⁴ The actual class is named _GeneratorContextManager. If you want to see exactly how it works, read its source code in Lib/contextlib.py in the Python 3.4 distribution.

⁵ The exception is sent into the generator using the throw method, covered in “Coroutine Termination and Exception Handling”.

⁶ This convention was adopted because when context managers were created, generators could not return values, only yield. They now can, as explained in “Returning a Value from a Coroutine”. As you’ll see, returning a value from a generator does involve an exception.

⁷ This tip is quoted literally from a comment by Leonardo Rochael, one of the tech reviewers for this book. Nicely said, Leo!

Chapter 16. Coroutines

If Python books are any guide, [coroutines are] the most poorly documented, obscure, and apparently useless feature of Python.

David Beazley, Python author

We find two main senses for the verb “to yield” in dictionaries: to produce or to give way. Both senses apply in Python when we use the yield keyword in a generator. A line such as yield item produces a value that is received by the caller of next(…), and it also gives way, suspending the execution of the generator so that the caller may proceed until it’s ready to consume another value by invoking next() again. The caller pulls values from the generator.

A coroutine is syntactically like a generator: just a function with the yield keyword in its body. However, in a coroutine, yield usually appears on the right side of an expression (e.g., datum = yield), and it may or may not produce a value—if there is no expression after the yield keyword, the generator yields None. The coroutine may receive data from the caller, which uses .send(datum) instead of next(…) to feed the coroutine. Usually, the caller pushes values into the coroutine.

It is even possible that no data goes in or out through the yield keyword. Regardless of the flow of data, yield is a control flow device that can be used to implement cooperative multitasking: each coroutine yields control to a central scheduler so that other coroutines can be activated.

When you start thinking of yield primarily in terms of control flow, you have the mindset to understand coroutines.

Python coroutines are the product of a series of enhancements to the humble generator functions we’ve seen so far in the book. Following the evolution of coroutines in Python helps understand their features in stages of increasing functionality and complexity.

After a brief overview of how generators were enable to act as a coroutine, we jump to the core of the chapter. Then we’ll see:

The behavior and states of a generator operating as a coroutine

Priming a coroutine automatically with a decorator

How the caller can control a coroutine through the .close() and .throw(…) methods of the generator object

How coroutines can return values upon termination

Usage and semantics of the new yield from syntax

A use case: coroutines for managing concurrent activities in a simulation

How Coroutines Evolved from Generators

The infrastructure for coroutines appeared in PEP 342 — Coroutines via Enhanced Generators, implemented in Python 2.5 (2006): since then, the yield keyword can be used in an expression, and the .send(value) method was added to the generator API. Using .send(…), the caller of the generator can post data that then becomes the value of the yield expression inside the generator function. This allows a generator to be used as a coroutine: a procedure that collaborates with the caller, yielding and receiving values from the caller.

In addition to .send(…), PEP 342 also added .throw(…) and .close() methods that respectively allow the caller to throw an exception to be handled inside the generator, and to terminate it. These features are covered in the next section and in “Coroutine Termination and Exception Handling”.

The latest evolutionary step for coroutines came with PEP 380 - Syntax for Delegating to a Subgenerator, implemented in Python 3.3 (2012). PEP 380 made two syntax changes to generator functions, to make them more useful as coroutines:

A generator can now return a value; previously, providing a value to the return statement inside a generator raised a SyntaxError.

The yield from syntax enables complex generators to be refactored into smaller, nested generators while avoiding a lot of boilerplate code previously required for a generator to delegate to subgenerators.

These latest changes will be addressed in “Returning a Value from a Coroutine” and “Using yield from”.

Let’s follow the established tradition of Fluent Python and start with some very basic facts and examples, then move into increasingly mind-bending features.

Basic Behavior of a Generator Used as a Coroutine

Example 16-1 illustrates the behavior of a coroutine.

Example 16-1. Simplest possible demonstration of coroutine in action

>>> def simple_coroutine():
...     print('-> coroutine started')
...     x = yield
...     print('-> coroutine received:', x)
...
>>> my_coro = simple_coroutine()
>>> my_coro
<generator object simple_coroutine at 0x100c2be10>
>>> next(my_coro)
-> coroutine started
>>> my_coro.send(42)
-> coroutine received: 42
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
StopIteration

A coroutine is defined as a generator function: with yield in its body.

yield is used in an expression; when the coroutine is designed just to receive data from the client it yields None—this is implicit because there is no expression to the right of the yield keyword.

As usual with generators, you call the function to get a generator object back.

The first call is next(…) because the generator hasn’t started so it’s not waiting in a yield and we can’t send it any data initially.

This call makes the yield in the coroutine body evaluate to 42; now the coroutine resumes and runs until the next yield or termination.

In this case, control flows off the end of the coroutine body, which prompts the generator machinery to raise StopIteration, as usual.

A coroutine can be in one of four states. You can determine the current state using the inspect.getgeneratorstate(…) function, which returns one of these strings:

'GEN_CREATED'

Waiting to start execution.

'GEN_RUNNING'

Currently being executed by the interpreter.¹

'GEN_SUSPENDED'

Currently suspended at a yield expression.

'GEN_CLOSED'

Execution has completed.

Because the argument to the send method will become the value of the pending yield expression, it follows that you can only make a call like my_coro.send(42) if the coroutine is currently suspended. But that’s not the case if the coroutine has never been activated—when its state is 'GEN_CREATED'. That’s why the first activation of a coroutine is always done with next(my_coro)—you can also call my_coro.send(None), and the effect is the same.

If you create a coroutine object and immediately try to send it a value that is not None, this is what happens:

>>> my_coro = simple_coroutine()
>>> my_coro.send(1729)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: can't send non-None value to a just-started generator

Note the error message: it’s quite clear.

The initial call next(my_coro) is often described as “priming” the coroutine (i.e., advancing it to the first yield to make it ready for use as a live coroutine).

To get a better feel for the behavior of a coroutine, an example that yields more than once is useful. See Example 16-2.

Example 16-2. A coroutine that yields twice

>>> def simple_coro2(a):
...     print('-> Started: a =', a)
...     b = yield a
...     print('-> Received: b =', b)
...     c = yield a + b
...     print('-> Received: c =', c)
...
>>> my_coro2 = simple_coro2(14)
>>> from inspect import getgeneratorstate
>>> getgeneratorstate(my_coro2)
'GEN_CREATED'
>>> next(my_coro2)
-> Started: a = 14
14
>>> getgeneratorstate(my_coro2)
'GEN_SUSPENDED'
>>> my_coro2.send(28)
-> Received: b = 28
42
>>> my_coro2.send(99)
-> Received: c = 99
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
StopIteration
>>> getgeneratorstate(my_coro2)
'GEN_CLOSED'

inspect.getgeneratorstate reports GEN_CREATED (i.e., the coroutine has not started).

Advance coroutine to first yield, printing -> Started: a = 14 message then yielding value of a and suspending to wait for value to be assigned to b.

getgeneratorstate reports GEN_SUSPENDED (i.e., the coroutine is paused at a yield expression).

Send number 28 to suspended coroutine; the yield expression evaluates to 28 and that number is bound to b. The -> Received: b = 28 message is displayed, the value of a + b is yielded (42), and the coroutine is suspended waiting for the value to be assigned to c.

Send number 99 to suspended coroutine; the yield expression evaluates to 99 the number is bound to c. The -> Received: c = 99 message is displayed, then the coroutine terminates, causing the generator object to raise StopIteration.

getgeneratorstate reports GEN_CLOSED (i.e., the coroutine execution has completed).

It’s crucial to understand that the execution of the coroutine is suspended exactly at the yield keyword. As mentioned before, in an assignment statement, the code to the right of the = is evaluated before the actual assignment happens. This means that in a line like b = yield a, the value of b will only be set when the coroutine is activated later by the client code. It takes some effort to get used to this fact, but understanding it is essential to make sense of the use of yield in asynchronous programming, as we’ll see later.

Execution of the simple_coro2 coroutine can be split in three phases, as shown in Figure 16-1:

next(my_coro2) prints first message and runs to yield a, yielding number 14.

my_coro2.send(28) assigns 28 to b, prints second message, and runs to yield a + b, yielding number 42.

my_coro2.send(99) assigns 99 to c, prints third message, and the coroutine terminates.

Figure 16-1. Three phases in the execution of the simple_coro2 coroutine (note that each phase ends in a yield expression, and the next phase starts in the very same line, when the value of the yield expression is assigned to a variable)

Now let’s consider a slightly more involved coroutine example.

Example: Coroutine to Compute a Running Average

While discussing closures in Chapter 7, we studied objects to compute a running average: Example 7-8 shows a plain class and Example 7-14 presents a higher-order function producing a closure to keep the total and count variables across invocations. Example 16-3 shows how to do the same with a coroutine.²

Example 16-3. coroaverager0.py: code for a running average coroutine

def averager():
    total = 0.0
    count = 0
    average = None
    while True:
        term = yield average
        total += term
        count += 1
        average = total/count

This infinite loop means this coroutine will keep on accepting values and producing results as long as the caller sends them. This coroutine will only terminate when the caller calls .close() on it, or when it’s garbage collected because there are no more references to it.

The yield statement here is used to suspend the coroutine, produce a result to the caller, and—later—to get a value sent by the caller to the coroutine, which resumes its infinite loop.

The advantage of using a coroutine is that total and count can be simple local variables: no instance attributes or closures are needed to keep the context between calls. Example 16-4 are doctests to show the averager coroutine in operation.

Example 16-4. coroaverager0.py: doctest for the running average coroutine in Example 16-3

    >>> coro_avg = averager()
    >>> next(coro_avg)
    >>> coro_avg.send(10)
    10.0
    >>> coro_avg.send(30)
    20.0
    >>> coro_avg.send(5)
    15.0

Create the coroutine object.

Prime it by calling next.

Now we are in business: each call to .send(…) yields the current average.

In the doctest (Example 16-4), the call next(coro_avg) makes the coroutine advance to the yield, yielding the initial value for average, which is None, so it does not appear on the console. At this point, the coroutine is suspended at the yield, waiting for a value to be sent. The line coro_avg.send(10) provides that value, causing the coroutine to activate, assigning it to term, updating the total, count, and average variables, and then starting another iteration in the while loop, which yields the average and waits for another term.

The attentive reader may be anxious to know how the execution of an averager instance (e.g., coro_avg) may be terminated, because its body is an infinite loop. We’ll cover that in “Coroutine Termination and Exception Handling”.

But before discussing coroutine termination, let’s talk about getting them started. Priming a coroutine before use is a necessary but easy-to-forget chore. To avoid it, a special decorator can be applied to the coroutine. One such decorator is presented next.

Decorators for Coroutine Priming

You can’t do much with a coroutine without priming it: we must always remember to call next(my_coro) before my_coro.send(x). To make coroutine usage more convenient, a priming decorator is sometimes used. The coroutine decorator in Example 16-5 is an example.³

Example 16-5. coroutil.py: decorator for priming coroutine

from functools import wraps

def coroutine(func):
    """Decorator: primes `func` by advancing to first `yield`"""
    @wraps(func)
    def primer(*args,**kwargs):
        gen = func(*args,**kwargs)
        next(gen)
        return gen
    return primer

The decorated generator function is replaced by this primer function which, when invoked, returns the primed generator.

Call the decorated function to get a generator object.

Prime the generator.

Return it.

Example 16-6 shows the @coroutine decorator in use. Contrast with Example 16-3.

Example 16-6. coroaverager1.py: doctest and code for a running average coroutine using the @coroutine decorator from Example 16-5

"""
A coroutine to compute a running average

    >>> coro_avg = averager()
    >>> from inspect import getgeneratorstate
    >>> getgeneratorstate(coro_avg)
    'GEN_SUSPENDED'
    >>> coro_avg.send(10)
    10.0
    >>> coro_avg.send(30)
    20.0
    >>> coro_avg.send(5)
    15.0

"""

from coroutil import coroutine

@coroutine
def averager():
    total = 0.0
    count = 0
    average = None
    while True:
        term = yield average
        total += term
        count += 1
        average = total/count

Call averager(), creating a generator object that is primed inside the primer function of the coroutine decorator.

getgeneratorstate reports GEN_SUSPENDED, meaning that the coroutine is ready to receive a value.

You can immediately start sending values to coro_avg: that’s the point of the decorator.

Import the coroutine decorator.

Apply it to the averager function.

The body of the function is exactly the same as Example 16-3.

Several frameworks provide special decorators designed to work with coroutines. Not all of them actually prime the coroutine—some provide other services, such as hooking it to an event loop. One example from the Tornado asynchronous networking library is the tornado.gen decorator.

The yield from syntax we’ll see in “Using yield from” automatically primes the coroutine called by it, making it incompatible with decorators such as @coroutine from Example 16-5. The asyncio.coroutine decorator from the Python 3.4 standard library is designed to work with yield from so it does not prime the coroutine. We’ll cover it in Chapter 18.

We’ll now focus on essential features of coroutines: the methods used to terminate and throw exceptions into them.

Coroutine Termination and Exception Handling

An unhandled exception within a coroutine propagates to the caller of the next or send that triggered it. Example 16-7 is an example using the decorated averager coroutine from Example 16-6.

Example 16-7. How an unhandled exception kills a coroutine

>>> from coroaverager1 import averager
>>> coro_avg = averager()
>>> coro_avg.send(40)
40.0
>>> coro_avg.send(50)
45.0
>>> coro_avg.send('spam')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +=: 'float' and 'str'
>>> coro_avg.send(60)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
StopIteration

Using the @coroutine decorated averager we can immediately start sending values.

Sending a nonnumeric value causes an exception inside the coroutine.

Because the exception was not handled in the coroutine, it terminated. Any attempt to reactivate it will raise StopIteration.

The cause of the error was the sending of a value 'spam' that could not be added to the total variable in the coroutine.

Example 16-7 suggests one way of terminating coroutines: you can use send with some sentinel value that tells the coroutine to exit. Constant built-in singletons like None and Ellipsis are convenient sentinel values. Ellipsis has the advantage of being quite unusual in data streams. Another sentinel value I’ve seen used is StopIteration—the class itself, not an instance of it (and not raising it). In other words, using it like: my_coro.send(StopIteration).

Since Python 2.5, generator objects have two methods that allow the client to explicitly send exceptions into the coroutine—throw and close:

generator.throw(exc_type[, exc_value[, traceback]])

Causes the yield expression where the generator was paused to raise the exception given. If the exception is handled by the generator, flow advances to the next yield, and the value yielded becomes the value of the generator.throw call. If the exception is not handled by the generator, it propagates to the context of the caller.

generator.close()

Causes the yield expression where the generator was paused to raise a GeneratorExit exception. No error is reported to the caller if the generator does not handle that exception or raises StopIteration—usually by running to completion. When receiving a GeneratorExit, the generator must not yield a value, otherwise a RuntimeError is raised. If any other exception is raised by the generator, it propagates to the caller.

Tip

The official documentation of the generator object methods is buried deep in The Python Language Reference, (see 6.2.9.1. Generator-iterator methods).

Let’s see how close and throw control a coroutine. Example 16-8 lists the demo_exc_handling function used in the following examples.

Example 16-8. coro_exc_demo.py: test code for studying exception handling in a coroutine

class DemoException(Exception):
    """An exception type for the demonstration."""

def demo_exc_handling():
    print('-> coroutine started')
    while True:
        try:
            x = yield
        except DemoException:
            print('*** DemoException handled. Continuing...')
        else:
            print('-> coroutine received: {!r}'.format(x))
    raise RuntimeError('This line should never run.')

Special handling for DemoException.

If no exception, display received value.

This line will never be executed.

The last line in Example 16-8 is unreachable because the infinite loop can only be aborted with an unhandled exception, and that terminates the coroutine immediately.

Normal operation of demo_exc_handling is shown in Example 16-9.

Example 16-9. Activating and closing demo_exc_handling without an exception

    >>> exc_coro = demo_exc_handling()
    >>> next(exc_coro)
    -> coroutine started
    >>> exc_coro.send(11)
    -> coroutine received: 11
    >>> exc_coro.send(22)
    -> coroutine received: 22
    >>> exc_coro.close()
    >>> from inspect import getgeneratorstate
    >>> getgeneratorstate(exc_coro)
    'GEN_CLOSED'

If the DemoException is thrown into the coroutine, it’s handled and the demo_exc_handling coroutine continues, as in Example 16-10.

Example 16-10. Throwing DemoException into demo_exc_handling does not break it

    >>> exc_coro = demo_exc_handling()
    >>> next(exc_coro)
    -> coroutine started
    >>> exc_coro.send(11)
    -> coroutine received: 11
    >>> exc_coro.throw(DemoException)
    *** DemoException handled. Continuing...
    >>> getgeneratorstate(exc_coro)
    'GEN_SUSPENDED'

On the other hand, if an unhandled exception is thrown into the coroutine, it stops—its state becomes 'GEN_CLOSED'. Example 16-11 demonstrates it.

Example 16-11. Coroutine terminates if it can’t handle an exception thrown into it

    >>> exc_coro = demo_exc_handling()
    >>> next(exc_coro)
    -> coroutine started
    >>> exc_coro.send(11)
    -> coroutine received: 11
    >>> exc_coro.throw(ZeroDivisionError)
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      ...
    ZeroDivisionError
    >>> getgeneratorstate(exc_coro)
    'GEN_CLOSED'

If it’s necessary that some cleanup code is run no matter how the coroutine ends, you need to wrap the relevant part of the coroutine body in a try/finally block, as in Example 16-12.

Example 16-12. coro_finally_demo.py: use of try/finally to perform actions on coroutine termination

class DemoException(Exception):
    """An exception type for the demonstration."""

def demo_finally():
    print('-> coroutine started')
    try:
        while True:
            try:
                x = yield
            except DemoException:
                print('*** DemoException handled. Continuing...')
            else:
                print('-> coroutine received: {!r}'.format(x))
    finally:
        print('-> coroutine ending')

One of the main reasons why the yield from construct was added to Python 3.3 has to do with throwing exceptions into nested coroutines. The other reason was to enable coroutines to return values more conveniently. Read on to see how.

Returning a Value from a Coroutine

Example 16-13 shows a variation of the averager coroutine that returns a result. For didactic reasons, it does not yield the running average with each activation. This is to emphasize that some coroutines do not yield anything interesting, but are designed to return a value at the end, often the result of some accumulation.

The result returned by averager in Example 16-13 is a namedtuple with the number of terms averaged (count) and the average. I could have returned just the average value, but returning a tuple exposes another interesting piece of data that was accumulated: the count of terms.

Example 16-13. coroaverager2.py: code for an averager coroutine that returns a result

from collections import namedtuple

Result = namedtuple('Result', 'count average')

def averager():
    total = 0.0
    count = 0
    average = None
    while True:
        term = yield
        if term is None:
            break
        total += term
        count += 1
        average = total/count
    return Result(count, average)

In order to return a value, a coroutine must terminate normally; this is why this version of averager has a condition to break out of its accumulating loop.

Return a namedtuple with the count and average. Before Python 3.3, it was a syntax error to return a value in a generator function.

To see how this new averager works, we can drive it from the console, as in Example 16-14.

Example 16-14. coroaverager2.py: doctest showing the behavior of averager

    >>> coro_avg = averager()
    >>> next(coro_avg)
    >>> coro_avg.send(10)
    >>> coro_avg.send(30)
    >>> coro_avg.send(6.5)
    >>> coro_avg.send(None)
    Traceback (most recent call last):
       ...
    StopIteration: Result(count=3, average=15.5)

This version does not yield values.

Sending None terminates the loop, causing the coroutine to end by returning the result. As usual, the generator object raises StopIteration. The value attribute of the exception carries the value returned.

Note that the value of the return expression is smuggled to the caller as an attribute of the StopIteration exception. This is a bit of a hack, but it preserves the existing behavior of generator objects: raising StopIteration when exhausted.

Example 16-15 shows how to retrieve the value returned by the coroutine.

Example 16-15. Catching StopIteration lets us get the value returned by averager

    >>> coro_avg = averager()
    >>> next(coro_avg)
    >>> coro_avg.send(10)
    >>> coro_avg.send(30)
    >>> coro_avg.send(6.5)
    >>> try:
    ...     coro_avg.send(None)
    ... except StopIteration as exc:
    ...     result = exc.value
    ...
    >>> result
    Result(count=3, average=15.5)

This roundabout way of getting the return value from a coroutine makes more sense when we realize it was defined as part of PEP 380, and the yield from construct handles it automatically by catching StopIteration internally. This is analogous to the use of StopIteration in for loops: the exception is handled by the loop machinery in a way that is transparent to the user. In the case of yield from, the interpreter not only consumes the StopIteration, but its value attribute becomes the value of the yield from expression itself. Unfortunately we can’t test this interactively in the console, because it’s a syntax error to use yield from—or yield, for that matter—outside of a function.⁴

The next section has an example where the averager coroutine is used with yield from to produce a result, as intended in PEP 380. So let’s tackle yield from.

Using yield from

The first thing to know about yield from is that it is a completely new language construct. It does so much more than yield that the reuse of that keyword is arguably misleading. Similar constructs in other languages are called await, and that is a much better name because it conveys a crucial point: when a generator gen calls yield from subgen(), the subgen takes over and will yield values to the caller of gen; the caller will in effect drive subgen directly. Meanwhile gen will be blocked, waiting until subgen terminates.⁵

We’ve seen in Chapter 14 that yield from can be used as a shortcut to yield in a for loop. For example, this:

>>> def gen():
...     for c in 'AB':
...         yield c
...     for i in range(1, 3):
...         yield i
...
>>> list(gen())
['A', 'B', 1, 2]

Can be written as:

>>> def gen():
...     yield from 'AB'
...     yield from range(1, 3)
...
>>> list(gen())
['A', 'B', 1, 2]

When we first mentioned yield from in “New Syntax in Python 3.3: yield from”, the code from Example 16-16 demonstrates a practical use for it.⁶

Example 16-16. Chaining iterables with yield from

>>> def chain(*iterables):
...     for it in iterables:
...         yield from it
...
>>> s = 'ABC'
>>> t = tuple(range(3))
>>> list(chain(s, t))
['A', 'B', 'C', 0, 1, 2]

A slightly more complicated—but more useful—example of yield from is in “Recipe 4.14. Flattening a Nested Sequence” in Beazley and Jones’s Python Cookbook, 3E (source code available on GitHub).

The first thing the yield from x expression does with the x object is to call iter(x) to obtain an iterator from it. This means that x can be any iterable.

However, if replacing nested for loops yielding values was the only contribution of yield from, this language addition wouldn’t have had a good chance of being accepted. The real nature of yield from cannot be demonstrated with simple iterables; it requires the mind-expanding use of nested generators. That’s why PEP 380, which introduced yield from, is titled “Syntax for Delegating to a Subgenerator.”

The main feature of yield from is to open a bidirectional channel from the outermost caller to the innermost subgenerator, so that values can be sent and yielded back and forth directly from them, and exceptions can be thrown all the way in without adding a lot of exception handling boilerplate code in the intermediate coroutines. This is what enables coroutine delegation in a way that was not possible before.

The use of yield from requires a nontrivial arrangement of code. To talk about the required moving parts, PEP 380 uses some terms in a very specific way:

delegating generator

The generator function that contains the yield from <iterable> expression.

subgenerator

The generator obtained from the <iterable> part of the yield from expression. This is the “subgenerator” mentioned in the title of PEP 380: “Syntax for Delegating to a Subgenerator.”

caller

PEP 380 uses the term “caller” to refer to the client code that calls the delegating generator. Depending on context, I use “client” instead of “caller,” to distinguish from the delegating generator, which is also a “caller” (it calls the subgenerator).

Tip

PEP 380 often uses the word “iterator” to refer to the subgenerator. That’s confusing because the delegating generator is also an iterator. So I prefer to use the term subgenerator, in line with the title of the PEP—“Syntax for Delegating to a Subgenerator.” However, the subgenerator can be a simple iterator implementing only __next__, and yield from can handle that too, although it was created to support generators implementing __next__, send, close, and throw.

Example 16-17 provides more context to see yield from at work, and Figure 16-2 identifies the relevant parts of the example.⁷

Figure 16-2. While the delegating generator is suspended at yield from, the caller sends data directly to the subgenerator, which yields data back to the caller. The delegating generator resumes when the subgenerator returns and the interpreter raises StopIteration with the returned value attached.

The coroaverager3.py script reads a dict with weights and heights from girls and boys in an imaginary seventh grade class. For example, the key 'boys;m' maps to the heights of 9 boys, in meters; 'girls;kg' are the weights of 10 girls in kilograms. The script feeds the data for each group into the averager coroutine we’ve seen before, and produces a report like this one:

$ python3 coroaverager3.py
 9 boys  averaging 40.42kg
 9 boys  averaging 1.39m
10 girls averaging 42.04kg
10 girls averaging 1.43m

The code in Example 16-17 is certainly not the most straightforward solution to the problem, but it serves to show yield from in action. This example is inspired by the one given in What’s New in Python 3.3.

Example 16-17. coroaverager3.py: using yield from to drive averager and report statistics

from collections import namedtuple

Result = namedtuple('Result', 'count average')

# the subgenerator
def averager():
    total = 0.0
    count = 0
    average = None
    while True:
        term = yield
        if term is None:
            break
        total += term
        count += 1
        average = total/count
    return Result(count, average)

# the delegating generator
def grouper(results, key):
    while True:
        results[key] = yield from averager()

# the client code, a.k.a. the caller
def main(data):
    results = {}
    for key, values in data.items():
        group = grouper(results, key)
        next(group)
        for value in values:
            group.send(value)
        group.send(None)  # important!

    # print(results)  # uncomment to debug
    report(results)

# output report
def report(results):
    for key, result in sorted(results.items()):
        group, unit = key.split(';')
        print('{:2} {:5} averaging {:.2f}{}'.format(
              result.count, group, result.average, unit))

data = {
    'girls;kg':
        [40.9, 38.5, 44.3, 42.2, 45.2, 41.7, 44.5, 38.0, 40.6, 44.5],
    'girls;m':
        [1.6, 1.51, 1.4, 1.3, 1.41, 1.39, 1.33, 1.46, 1.45, 1.43],
    'boys;kg':
        [39.0, 40.8, 43.2, 40.8, 43.1, 38.6, 41.4, 40.6, 36.3],
    'boys;m':
        [1.38, 1.5, 1.32, 1.25, 1.37, 1.48, 1.25, 1.49, 1.46],
}

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main(data)

Same averager coroutine from Example 16-13. Here it is the subgenerator.

Each value sent by the client code in main will be bound to term here.

The crucial terminating condition. Without it, a yield from calling this coroutine will block forever.

The returned Result will be the value of the yield from expression in grouper.

grouper is the delegating generator.

Each iteration in this loop creates a new instance of averager; each is a generator object operating as a coroutine.

Whenever grouper is sent a value, it’s piped into the averager instance by the yield from. grouper will be suspended here as long as the averager instance is consuming values sent by the client. When an averager instance runs to the end, the value it returns is bound to results[key]. The while loop then proceeds to create another averager instance to consume more values.

main is the client code, or “caller” in PEP 380 parlance. This is the function that drives everything.

group is a generator object resulting from calling grouper with the results dict to collect the results, and a particular key. It will operate as a coroutine.

Prime the coroutine.

Send each value into the grouper. That value ends up in the term = yield line of averager; grouper never has a chance to see it.

Sending None into grouper causes the current averager instance to terminate, and allows grouper to run again, which creates another averager for the next group of values.

The last callout in Example 16-17 with the comment "important!" highlights a crucial line of code: group.send(None), which terminates one averager and starts the next. If you comment out that line, the script produces no output. Uncommenting the print(results) line near the end of main reveals that the results dict ends up empty.

Note

If you want to figure out for yourself why no results are collected, it will be a great way to exercise your understanding of how yield from works. The code for coroaverager3.py is in the Fluent Python code repository. The explanation is next.

Here is an overview of how Example 16-17 works, explaining what would happen if we omitted the call group.send(None) marked “important!” in main:

Each iteration of the outer for loop creates a new grouper instance named group; this is the delegating generator.

The call next(group) primes the grouper delegating generator, which enters its while True loop and suspends at the yield from, after calling the subgenerator averager.

The inner for loop calls group.send(value); this feeds the subgenerator averager directly. Meanwhile, the current group instance of grouper is suspended at the yield from.

When the inner for loop ends, the group instance is still suspended at the yield from, so the assignment to results[key] in the body of grouper has not happened yet.

Without the last group.send(None) in the outer for loop, the averager subgenerator never terminates, the delegating generator group is never reactivated, and the assignment to results[key] never happens.

When execution loops back to the top of the outer for loop, a new grouper instance is created and bound to group. The previous grouper instance is garbage collected (together with its own unfinished averager subgenerator instance).

Warning

The key takeaway from this experiment is: if a subgenerator never terminates, the delegating generator will be suspended forever at the yield from. This will not prevent your program from making progress because the yield from (like the simple yield) transfers control to the client code (i.e., the caller of the delegating generator). But it does mean that some task will be left unfinished.

Example 16-17 demonstrates the simplest arrangement of yield from, with only one delegating generator and one subgenerator. Because the delegating generator works as a pipe, you can connect any number of them in a pipeline: one delegating generator uses yield from to call a subgenerator, which itself is a delegating generator calling another subgenerator with yield from, and so on. Eventually this chain must end in a simple generator that uses just yield, but it may also end in any iterable object, as in Example 16-16.

Every yield from chain must be driven by a client that calls next(…) or .send(…) on the outermost delegating generator. This call may be implicit, such as a for loop.

Now let’s review the formal description of the yield from construct, as presented in PEP 380.

The Meaning of yield from

While developing PEP 380, Greg Ewing—the author—was questioned about the complexity of the proposed semantics. One of his answers was “For humans, almost all the important information is contained in one paragraph near the top.” He then quoted part of the draft of PEP 380 which at the time read as follows:

“When the iterator is another generator, the effect is the same as if the body of the subgenerator were inlined at the point of the yield from expression. Furthermore, the subgenerator is allowed to execute a return statement with a value, and that value becomes the value of the yield from expression.”⁸

Those soothing words are no longer part of the PEP—because they don’t cover all the corner cases. But they are OK as a first approximation.

The approved version of PEP 380 explains the behavior of yield from in six points in the Proposal section. I reproduce them almost exactly here, except that I replaced every occurrence of the ambiguous word “iterator” with “subgenerator” and added a few clarifications. Example 16-17 illustrates these four points:

Any values that the subgenerator yields are passed directly to the caller of the delegating generator (i.e., the client code).

Any values sent to the delegating generator using send() are passed directly to the subgenerator. If the sent value is None, the subgenerator’s __next__() method is called. If the sent value is not None, the subgenerator’s send() method is called. If the call raises StopIteration, the delegating generator is resumed. Any other exception is propagated to the delegating generator.

return expr in a generator (or subgenerator) causes StopIteration(expr) to be raised upon exit from the generator.

The value of the yield from expression is the first argument to the StopIteration exception raised by the subgenerator when it terminates.

The other two features of yield from have to do with exceptions and termination:

Exceptions other than GeneratorExit thrown into the delegating generator are passed to the throw() method of the subgenerator. If the call raises StopIteration, the delegating generator is resumed. Any other exception is propagated to the delegating generator.

If a GeneratorExit exception is thrown into the delegating generator, or the close() method of the delegating generator is called, then the close() method of the subgenerator is called if it has one. If this call results in an exception, it is propagated to the delegating generator. Otherwise, GeneratorExit is raised in the delegating generator.

The detailed semantics of yield from are subtle, especially the points dealing with exceptions. Greg Ewing did a great job putting them to words in English in PEP 380.

Ewing also documented the behavior of yield from using pseudocode (with Python syntax). I personally found it useful to spend some time studying the pseudocode in PEP 380. However, the pseudocode is 40 lines long and not so easy to grasp at first.

A good way to approach that pseudocode is to simplify it to handle only the most basic and common use case of yield from.

Consider that yield from appears in a delegating generator. The client code drives the delegating generator, which drives the subgenerator. So, to simplify the logic involved, let’s pretend the client doesn’t ever call .throw(…) or .close() on the delegating generator. Let’s also pretend the subgenerator never raises an exception until it terminates, when StopIteration is raised by the interpreter.

Example 16-17 is a script where those simplifying assumptions hold. In fact, in much real-life code, the delegating generator is expected to run to completion. So let’s see how yield from works in this happier, simpler world.

Take a look at Example 16-18, which is an expansion of this single statement, in the body of the delegating generator:

RESULT = yield from EXPR

Try to follow the logic in Example 16-18.

Example 16-18. Simplified pseudocode equivalent to the statement RESULT = yield from EXPR in the delegating generator (this covers the simplest case: .throw(…) and .close() are not supported; the only exception handled is StopIteration)

_i = iter(EXPR)
try:
    _y = next(_i)
except StopIteration as _e:
    _r = _e.value
else:
    while 1:
        _s = yield _y
        try:
            _y = _i.send(_s)
        except StopIteration as _e:
            _r = _e.value
            break

RESULT = _r

The EXPR can be any iterable, because iter() is applied to get an iterator _i (this is the subgenerator).

The subgenerator is primed; the result is stored to be the first yielded value _y.

If StopIteration was raised, extract the value attribute from the exception and assign it to _r: this is the RESULT in the simplest case.

While this loop is running, the delegating generator is blocked, operating just as a channel between the caller and the subgenerator.

Yield the current item yielded from the subgenerator; wait for a value _s sent by the caller. Note that this is the only yield in this listing.

Try to advance the subgenerator, forwarding the _s sent by the caller.

If the subgenerator raised StopIteration, get the value, assign to _r, and exit the loop, resuming the delegating generator.

_r is the RESULT: the value of the whole yield from expression.

In this simplified pseudocode, I preserved the variable names used in the pseudocode published in PEP 380. The variables are:

_i (iterator)

The subgenerator

_y (yielded)

A value yielded from the subgenerator

_r (result)

The eventual result (i.e., the value of the yield from expression when the subgenerator ends)

_s (sent)

A value sent by the caller to the delegating generator, which is forwarded to the subgenerator

_e (exception)

An exception (always an instance of StopIteration in this simplified pseudocode)

Besides not handling .throw(…) and .close(), the simplified pseudocode always uses .send(…) to forward next() or .send(…) calls by the client to the subgenerator. Don’t worry about these fine distinctions on a first reading. As mentioned, Example 16-17 would run perfectly well if the yield from did only what is shown in the simplified pseudocode in Example 16-18.

But the reality is more complicated, because of the need to handle .throw(…) and .close() calls from the client, which must be passed into the subgenerator. Also, the subgenerator may be a plain iterator that does not support .throw(…) or .close(), so this must be handled by the yield from logic. If the subgenerator does implement those methods, inside the subgenerator both methods cause exceptions to be raised, which must be handled by the yield from machinery as well. The subgenerator may also throw exceptions of its own, unprovoked by the caller, and this must also be dealt with in the yield from implementation. Finally, as an optimization, if the caller calls next(…) or .send(None), both are forwarded as a next(…) call on the subgenerator; only if the caller sends a non-None value, the .send(…) method of the subgenerator is used.

For your convenience, following is the complete pseudocode of the yield from expansion from PEP 380, with numbered annotations. Example 16-19 was copied verbatim; only the callout numbers were added by me.

Again, the code shown in Example 16-19 is an expansion of this single statement, in the body of the delegating generator:

RESULT = yield from EXPR

Example 16-19. Pseudocode equivalent to the statement RESULT = yield from EXPR in the delegating generator

_i = iter(EXPR)
try:
    _y = next(_i)
except StopIteration as _e:
    _r = _e.value
else:
    while 1:
        try:
            _s = yield _y
        except GeneratorExit as _e:
            try:
                _m = _i.close
            except AttributeError:
                pass
            else:
                _m()
            raise _e
        except BaseException as _e:
            _x = sys.exc_info()
            try:
                _m = _i.throw
            except AttributeError:
                raise _e
            else:
                try:
                    _y = _m(*_x)
                except StopIteration as _e:
                    _r = _e.value
                    break
        else:
            try:
                if _s is None:
                    _y = next(_i)
                else:
                    _y = _i.send(_s)
            except StopIteration as _e:
                _r = _e.value
                break

RESULT = _r

The EXPR can be any iterable, because iter() is applied to get an iterator _i (this is the subgenerator).

The subgenerator is primed; the result is stored to be the first yielded value _y.

If StopIteration was raised, extract the value attribute from the exception and assign it to _r: this is the RESULT in the simplest case.

While this loop is running, the delegating generator is blocked, operating just as a channel between the caller and the subgenerator.

Yield the current item yielded from the subgenerator; wait for a value _s sent by the caller. This is the only yield in this listing.

This deals with closing the delegating generator and the subgenerator. Because the subgenerator can be any iterator, it may not have a close method.

This deals with exceptions thrown in by the caller using .throw(…). Again, the subgenerator may be an iterator with no throw method to be called—in which case the exception is raised in the delegating generator.

If the subgenerator has a throw method, call it with the exception passed from the caller. The subgenerator may handle the exception (and the loop continues); it may raise StopIteration (the _r result is extracted from it, and the loop ends); or it may raise the same or another exception, which is not handled here and propagates to the delegating generator.

If no exception was received when yielding…

Try to advance the subgenerator…

Call next on the subgenerator if the last value received from the caller was None, otherwise call send.

If the subgenerator raised StopIteration, get the value, assign to _r, and exit the loop, resuming the delegating generator.

_r is the RESULT: the value of the whole yield from expression.

Most of the logic of the yield from pseudocode is implemented in six try/except blocks nested up to four levels deep, so it’s a bit hard to read. The only other control flow keywords used are one while, one if, and one yield. Find the while, the yield, the next(…), and the .send(…) calls: they will help you get an idea of how the whole structure works.

Right at the top of Example 16-19, one important detail revealed by the pseudocode is that the subgenerator is primed (second callout in Example 16-19).⁹ This means that auto-priming decorators such as that in “Decorators for Coroutine Priming” are incompatible with yield from.

In the same message I quoted in the opening of this section, Greg Ewing has this to say about the pseudocode expansion of yield from:

You’re not meant to learn about it by reading the expansion—that’s only there to pin down all the details for language lawyers.

Focusing on the details of the pseudocode expansion may not be helpful—depending on your learning style. Studying real code that uses yield from is certainly more profitable than poring over the pseudocode of its implementation. However, almost all the yield from examples I’ve seen are tied to asynchronous programming with the asyncio module, so they depend on an active event loop to work. We’ll see yield from numerous times in Chapter 18. There are a few links in “Further Reading” to interesting code using yield from without an event loop.

We’ll now move on to a classic example of coroutine usage: programming simulations. This example does not showcase yield from, but it does reveal how coroutines are used to manage concurrent activities on a single thread.

Use Case: Coroutines for Discrete Event Simulation

Coroutines are a natural way of expressing many algorithms, such as simulations, games, asynchronous I/O, and other forms of event-driven programming or co-operative multitasking.¹⁰

Guido van Rossum and Phillip J. Eby, PEP 342—Coroutines via Enhanced Generators

In this section, I will describe a very simple simulation implemented using just coroutines and standard library objects. Simulation is a classic application of coroutines in the computer science literature. Simula, the first OO language, introduced the concept of coroutines precisely to support simulations.

Note

The motivation for the following simulation example is not academic. Coroutines are the fundamental building block of the asyncio package. A simulation shows how to implement concurrent activities using coroutines instead of threads—and this will greatly help when we tackle asyncio in Chapter 18.

Before going into the example, a word about simulations.

About Discrete Event Simulations

A discrete event simulation (DES) is a type of simulation where a system is modeled as a sequence of events. In a DES, the simulation “clock” does not advance by fixed increments, but advances directly to the simulated time of the next modeled event. For example, if we are simulating the operation of a taxi cab from a high-level perspective, one event is picking up a passenger, the next is dropping the passenger off. It doesn’t matter if a trip takes 5 or 50 minutes: when the drop off event happens, the clock is updated to the end time of the trip in a single operation. In a DES, we can simulate a year of cab trips in less than a second. This is in contrast to a continuous simulation where the clock advances continuously by a fixed—and usually small—increment.

Intuitively, turn-based games are examples of discrete event simulations: the state of the game only changes when a player moves, and while a player is deciding the next move, the simulation clock is frozen. Real-time games, on the other hand, are continuous simulations where the simulation clock is running all the time, the state of the game is updated many times per second, and slow players are at a real disadvantage.

Both types of simulations can be written with multiple threads or a single thread using event-oriented programming techniques such as callbacks or coroutines driven by an event loop. It’s arguably more natural to implement a continuous simulation using threads to account for actions happening in parallel in real time. On the other hand, coroutines offer exactly the right abstraction for writing a DES. SimPy¹¹ is a DES package for Python that uses one coroutine to represent each process in the simulation.

Tip

In the field of simulation, the term process refers to the activities of an entity in the model, and not to an OS process. A simulation process may be implemented as an OS process, but usually a thread or a coroutine is used for that purpose.

If you are interested in simulations, SimPy is well worth studying. However, in this section, I will describe a very simple DES implemented using only standard library features. My goal is to help you develop an intuition about programming concurrent actions with coroutines. Understanding the next section will require careful study, but the reward will come as insights on how libraries such as asyncio, Twisted, and Tornado can manage many concurrent activities using a single thread of execution.

The Taxi Fleet Simulation

In our simulation program, taxi_sim.py, a number of taxi cabs are created. Each will make a fixed number of trips and then go home. A taxi leaves the garage and starts “prowling”—looking for a passenger. This lasts until a passenger is picked up, and a trip starts. When the passenger is dropped off, the taxi goes back to prowling.

The time elapsed during prowls and trips is generated using an exponential distribution. For a cleaner display, times are in whole minutes, but the simulation would work as well using float intervals.¹² Each change of state in each cab is reported as an event. Figure 16-3 shows a sample run of the program.

The most important thing to note in Figure 16-3 is the interleaving of the trips by the three taxis. I manually added the arrows to make it easier to see the taxi trips: each arrow starts when a passenger is picked up and ends when the passenger is dropped off. Intuitively, this demonstrates how coroutines can be used for managing concurrent activities.

Other things to note about Figure 16-3:

Each taxi leaves the garage 5 minutes after the other.

It took 2 minutes for taxi 0 to pick up the first passenger at time=2; 3 minutes for taxi 1 (time=8), and 5 minutes for taxi 2 (time=15).

The cabbie in taxi 0 only makes two trips (purple arrows): the first starts at time=2 and ends at time=18; the second starts at time=28 and ends at time=65—the longest trip in this simulation run.

Taxi 1 makes four trips (green arrows) then goes home at time=110.

Taxi 2 makes six trips (red arrows) then goes home at time=109. His last trip lasts only one minute, starting at time=97.¹³

While taxi 1 is making her first trip, starting at time=8, taxi 2 leaves the garage at time=10 and completes two trips (short red arrows).

In this sample run, all scheduled events completed in the default simulation time of 180 minutes; last event was at time=110.

Figure 16-3. Sample run of taxi_sim.py with three taxis. The -s 3 argument sets the random generator seed so program runs can be reproduced for debugging and demonstration. Colored arrows highlight taxi trips.

The simulation may also end with pending events. When that happens, the final message reads like this:

*** end of simulation time: 3 events pending ***

The full listing of taxi_sim.py is at Example A-6. In this chapter, we’ll show only the parts that are relevant to our study of coroutines. The really important functions are only two: taxi_process (a coroutine), and the Simulator.run method where the main loop of the simulation is executed.

Example 16-20 shows the code for taxi_process. This coroutine uses two objects defined elsewhere: the compute_delay function, which returns a time interval in minutes, and the Event class, a namedtuple defined like this:

Event = collections.namedtuple('Event', 'time proc action')

In an Event instance, time is the simulation time when the event will occur, proc is the identifier of the taxi process instance, and action is a string describing the activity.

Let’s review taxi_process play by play in Example 16-20.

Example 16-20. taxi_sim.py: taxi_process coroutine that implements the activities of each taxi

def taxi_process(ident, trips, start_time=0):
    """Yield to simulator issuing event at each state change"""
    time = yield Event(start_time, ident, 'leave garage')
    for i in range(trips):
        time = yield Event(time, ident, 'pick up passenger')
        time = yield Event(time, ident, 'drop off passenger')

    yield Event(time, ident, 'going home')
    # end of taxi process

taxi_process will be called once per taxi, creating a generator object to represent its operations. ident is the number of the taxi (e.g., 0, 1, 2 in the sample run); trips is the number of trips this taxi will make before going home; start_time is when the taxi leaves the garage.

The first Event yielded is 'leave garage'. This suspends the coroutine, and lets the simulation main loop proceed to the next scheduled event. When it’s time to reactivate this process, the main loop will send the current simulation time, which is assigned to time.

This block will be repeated once for each trip.

An Event signaling passenger pick up is yielded. The coroutine pauses here. When the time comes to reactivate this coroutine, the main loop will again send the current time.

An Event signaling passenger drop off is yielded. The coroutine is suspended again, waiting for the main loop to send it the time of when it’s reactivated.

The for loop ends after the given number of trips, and a final 'going home' event is yielded. The coroutine will suspend for the last time. When reactivated, it will be sent the time from the simulation main loop, but here I don’t assign it to any variable because it will not be used.

When the coroutine falls off the end, the generator object raises StopIteration.

You can “drive” a taxi yourself by calling taxi_process in the Python console.¹⁴ Example 16-21 shows how.

Example 16-21. Driving the taxi_process coroutine

>>> from taxi_sim import taxi_process
>>> taxi = taxi_process(ident=13, trips=2, start_time=0)
>>> next(taxi)
Event(time=0, proc=13, action='leave garage')
>>> taxi.send(_.time + 7)
Event(time=7, proc=13, action='pick up passenger')
>>> taxi.send(_.time + 23)
Event(time=30, proc=13, action='drop off passenger')
>>> taxi.send(_.time + 5)
Event(time=35, proc=13, action='pick up passenger')
>>> taxi.send(_.time + 48)
Event(time=83, proc=13, action='drop off passenger')
>>> taxi.send(_.time + 1)
Event(time=84, proc=13, action='going home')
>>> taxi.send(_.time + 10)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
StopIteration

Create a generator object to represent a taxi with ident=13 that will make two trips and start working at t=0.

Prime the coroutine; it yields the initial event.

We can now send it the current time. In the console, the _ variable is bound to the last result; here I add 7 to the time, which means the taxi will spend 7 minutes searching for the first passenger.

This is yielded by the for loop at the start of the first trip.

Sending _.time + 23 means the trip with the first passenger will last 23 minutes.

Then the taxi will prowl for 5 minutes.

The last trip will take 48 minutes.

After two complete trips, the loop ends and the 'going home' event is yielded.

The next attempt to send to the coroutine causes it to fall through the end. When it returns, the interpreter raises StopIteration.

Note that in Example 16-21 I am using the console to emulate the simulation main loop. I get the .time attribute of an Event yielded by the taxi coroutine, add an arbitrary number, and use the sum in the next taxi.send call to reactivate it. In the simulation, the taxi coroutines are driven by the main loop in the Simulator.run method. The simulation “clock” is held in the sim_time variable, and is updated by the time of each event yielded.

To instantiate the Simulator class, the main function of taxi_sim.py builds a taxis dictionary like this:

    taxis = {i: taxi_process(i, (i + 1) * 2, i * DEPARTURE_INTERVAL)
             for i in range(num_taxis)}
    sim = Simulator(taxis)

DEPARTURE_INTERVAL is 5; if num_taxis is 3 as in the sample run, the preceding lines will do the same as:

    taxis = {0: taxi_process(ident=0, trips=2, start_time=0),
             1: taxi_process(ident=1, trips=4, start_time=5),
             2: taxi_process(ident=2, trips=6, start_time=10)}
    sim = Simulator(taxis)

Therefore, the values of the taxis dictionary will be three distinct generator objects with different parameters. For instance, taxi 1 will make 4 trips and begin looking for passengers at start_time=5. This dict is the only argument required to build a Simulator instance.

The Simulator.__init__ method is shown in Example 16-22. The main data structures of Simulator are:

self.events

A PriorityQueue to hold Event instances. A PriorityQueue lets you put items, then get them ordered by item[0]; i.e., the time attribute in the case of our Event namedtuple objects.

self.procs

A dict mapping each process number to an active process in the simulation—a generator object representing one taxi. This will be bound to a copy of taxis dict shown earlier.

Example 16-22. taxi_sim.py: Simulator class initializer

class Simulator:

    def __init__(self, procs_map):
        self.events = queue.PriorityQueue()
        self.procs = dict(procs_map)

The PriorityQueue to hold the scheduled events, ordered by increasing time.

We get the procs_map argument as a dict (or any mapping), but build a dict from it, to have a local copy because when the simulation runs, each taxi that goes home is removed from self.procs, and we don’t want to change the object passed by the user.

Priority queues are a fundamental building block of discrete event simulations: events are created in any order, placed in the queue, and later retrieved in order according to the scheduled time of each one. For example, the first two events placed in the queue may be:

Event(time=14, proc=0, action='pick up passenger')
Event(time=11, proc=1, action='pick up passenger')

This means that taxi 0 will take 14 minutes to pick up the first passenger, while taxi 1—starting at time=10—will take 1 minute and pick up a passenger at time=11. If those two events are in the queue, the first event the main loop gets from the priority queue will be Event(time=11, proc=1, action='pick up passenger').

Now let’s study the main algorithm of the simulation, the Simulator.run method. It’s invoked by the main function right after the Simulator is instantiated, like this:

    sim = Simulator(taxis)
    sim.run(end_time)

The listing with callouts for the Simulator class is in Example 16-23, but here is a high-level view of the algorithm implemented in Simulator.run:

Loop over processes representing taxis.

Prime the coroutine for each taxi by calling next() on it. This will yield the first Event for each taxi.

Put each event in the self.events queue of the Simulator.

Run the main loop of the simulation while sim_time < end_time.

Check if self.events is empty; if so, break from the loop.

Get the current_event from self.events. This will be the Event object with the lowest time in the PriorityQueue.

Display the Event.

Update the simulation time with the time attribute of the current_event.

Send the time to the coroutine identified by the proc attribute of the current_event. The coroutine will yield the next_event.

Schedule next_event by adding it to the self.events queue.

The complete Simulator class is Example 16-23.

Example 16-23. taxi_sim.py: Simulator, a bare-bones discrete event simulation class; focus on the run method

class Simulator:

    def __init__(self, procs_map):
        self.events = queue.PriorityQueue()
        self.procs = dict(procs_map)

    def run(self, end_time):
        """Schedule and display events until time is up"""
        # schedule the first event for each cab
        for _, proc in sorted(self.procs.items()):
            first_event = next(proc)
            self.events.put(first_event)

        # main loop of the simulation
        sim_time = 0
        while sim_time < end_time:
            if self.events.empty():
                print('*** end of events ***')
                break

            current_event = self.events.get()
            sim_time, proc_id, previous_action = current_event
            print('taxi:', proc_id, proc_id * '   ', current_event)
            active_proc = self.procs[proc_id]
            next_time = sim_time + compute_duration(previous_action)
            try:
                next_event = active_proc.send(next_time)
            except StopIteration:
                del self.procs[proc_id]
            else:
                self.events.put(next_event)
        else:
            msg = '*** end of simulation time: {} events pending ***'
            print(msg.format(self.events.qsize()))

The simulation end_time is the only required argument for run.

Use sorted to retrieve the self.procs items ordered by the key; we don’t care about the key, so assign it to _.

next(proc) primes each coroutine by advancing it to the first yield, so it’s ready to be sent data. An Event is yielded.

Add each event to the self.events PriorityQueue. The first event for each taxi is 'leave garage', as seen in the sample run (Example 16-20).

Zero sim_time, the simulation clock.

Main loop of the simulation: run while sim_time is less than the end_time.

The main loop may also exit if there are no pending events in the queue.

Get Event with the smallest time in the priority queue; this is the current_event.

Unpack the Event data. This line updates the simulation clock, sim_time, to reflect the time when the event happened.¹⁵

Display the Event, identifying the taxi and adding indentation according to the taxi ID.

Retrieve the coroutine for the active taxi from the self.procs dictionary.

Compute the next activation time by adding the sim_time and the result of calling compute_duration(…) with the previous action (e.g., 'pick up passenger', 'drop off passenger', etc.)

Send the time to the taxi coroutine. The coroutine will yield the next_event or raise StopIteration when it’s finished.

If StopIteration is raised, delete the coroutine from the self.procs dictionary.

Otherwise, put the next_event in the queue.

If the loop exits because the simulation time passed, display the number of events pending (which may be zero by coincidence, sometimes).

Linking back to Chapter 15, note that the Simulator.run method in Example 16-23 uses else blocks in two places that are not if statements:

The main while loop has an else statement to report that the simulation ended because the end_time was reached—and not because there were no more events to process.

The try statement at the bottom of the while loop tries to get a next_event by sending the next_time to the current taxi process, and if that is successful the else block puts the next_event into the self.events queue.

I believe the code in Simulator.run would be a bit harder to read without those else blocks.

The point of this example was to show a main loop processing events and driving coroutines by sending data to them. This is the basic idea behind asyncio, which we’ll study in Chapter 18.

Chapter Summary

Guido van Rossum wrote there are three different styles of code you can write using generators:

There’s the traditional “pull” style (iterators), “push” style (like the averaging example), and then there are “tasks” (Have you read Dave Beazley’s coroutines tutorial yet?…).¹⁶

Chapter 14 was devoted to iterators; this chapter introduced coroutines used in “push style” and also as very simple “tasks”—the taxi processes in the simulation example. Chapter 18 will put them to use as asynchronous tasks in concurrent programming.

The running average example demonstrated a common use for a coroutine: as an accumulator processing items sent to it. We saw how a decorator can be applied to prime a coroutine, making it more convenient to use in some cases. But keep in mind that priming decorators are not compatible with some uses of coroutines. In particular, yield from subgenerator() assumes the subgenerator is not primed, and primes it automatically.

Accumulator coroutines can yield back partial results with each send method call, but they become more useful when they can return values, a feature that was added in Python 3.3 with PEP 380. We saw how the statement return the_result in a generator now raises StopIteration(the_result), allowing the caller to retrieve the_result from the value attribute of the exception. This is a rather cumbersome way to retrieve coroutine results, but it’s handled automatically by the yield from syntax introduced in PEP 380.

The coverage of yield from started with trivial examples using simple iterables, then moved to an example highlighting the three main components of any significant use of yield from: the delegating generator (defined by the use of yield from in its body), the subgenerator activated by yield from, and the client code that actually drives the whole setup by sending values to the subgenerator through the pass-through channel established by yield from in the delegating generator. This section was wrapped up with a look at the formal definition of yield from behavior as described in PEP 380 using English and Python-like pseudocode.

We closed the chapter with the discrete event simulation example, showing how generators can be used as an alternative to threads and callbacks to support concurrency. Although simple, the taxi simulation gives a first glimpse at how event-driven frameworks like Tornado and asyncio use a main loop to drive coroutines executing concurrent activities with a single thread of execution. In event-oriented programming with coroutines, each concurrent activity is carried out by a coroutine that repeatedly yields control back to the main loop, allowing other coroutines to be activated and move forward. This is a form of cooperative multitasking: coroutines voluntarily and explicitly yield control to the central scheduler. In contrast, threads implement preemptive multitasking. The scheduler can suspend threads at any time—even halfway through a statement—to give way to other threads.

One final note: this chapter adopted a broad, informal definition of a coroutine: a generator function driven by a client sending it data through .send(…) calls or yield from. This broad definition is the one used in PEP 342 — Coroutines via Enhanced Generators and in most existing Python books as I write this. The asyncio library we’ll see in Chapter 18 is built on coroutines, but a stricter definition of coroutine is adopted there: asyncio coroutines are (usually) decorated with an @asyncio.coroutine decorator, and they are always driven by yield from, not by calling .send(…) directly on them. Of course, asyncio coroutines are driven by next(…) and .send(…) under the covers, but in user code we only use yield from to make them run.

Further Reading

David Beazley is the ultimate authority on Python generators and coroutines. The Python Cookbook, 3E (O’Reilly) he coauthored with Brian Jones has numerous recipes with coroutines. Beazley’s PyCon tutorials on the subject are legendary for their depth and breadth. The first was at PyCon US 2008: “Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers”. PyCon US 2009 saw the legendary “A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency” (hard-to-find video links for all three parts: part 1, part 2, part 3). His most recent tutorial from PyCon 2014 in Montréal was “Generators: The Final Frontier,” in which he tackles more concurrency examples—so it’s really more about topics in Chapter 18 of Fluent Python. Dave can’t resist making brains explode in his classes, so in the last part of “The Final Frontier,” coroutines replace the classic Visitor pattern in an arithmetic expression evaluator.

Coroutines allow new ways of organizing code, and just as recursion or polymorphism (dynamic dispatch), it takes some time getting used to their possibilities. An interesting example of classic algorithm rewritten with coroutines is in the post “Greedy algorithm with coroutines,” by James Powell. You may also want to browse “Popular recipes tagged coroutine" in the ActiveState Code recipes database.

Paul Sokolovsky implemented yield from in Damien George’s super lean MicroPython interpreter designed to run on microcontrollers. As he studied the feature, he created a great, detailed diagram to explain how yield from works, and shared it in the python-tulip mailing list. Sokolovsky was kind enough to allow me to copy the PDF to this book’s site, where it has a more permanent URL.

As I write this, the vast majority of uses of yield from to be found are in asyncio itself or code that uses it. I spent a lot of time looking for examples of yield from that did not depend on asyncio. Greg Ewing—who penned PEP 380 and implemented yield from in CPython—published a few examples of its use: a BinaryTree class, a simple XML parser, and a task scheduler.

Brett Slatkin’s Effective Python (Addison-Wesley) has an excellent short chapter titled “Consider Coroutines to Run Many Functions Concurrently” (available online as a sample chapter). That chapter includes the best example of driving generators with yield from I’ve seen: an implementation of John Conway’s Game of Life in which coroutines are used to manage the state of each cell as the game runs. The example code for Effective Python can be found in a GitHub repository. I refactored the code for the Game of Life example—separating the functions and classes that implement the game from the testing snippets used in Slatkin’s book (original code). I also rewrote the tests as doctests, so you can see the output of the various coroutines and classes without running the script. The refactored example is posted as a GitHub gist.

Other interesting examples of yield from without asyncio appear in a message to the Python Tutor list, “Comparing two CSV files using Python” by Peter Otten, and a Rock-Paper-Scissors game in Ian Ward’s “Iterables, Iterators, and Generators” tutorial published as an iPython notebook.

Guido van Rossum sent a long message to the python-tulip Google Group titled “The difference between yield and yield-from" that is worth reading. Nick Coghlan posted a heavily commented version of the yield from expansion to Python-Dev on March 21, 2009; in the same message, he wrote:

Whether or not different people will find code using yield from difficult to understand or not will have more to do with their grasp of the concepts of cooperative multitasking in general more so than the underlying trickery involved in allowing truly nested generators.

PEP 492 — Coroutines with async and await syntax by Yury Selivanov proposes the addition of two keywords to Python: async and await. The former will be used with other existing keywords to define new language constructs. For example, async def will be used to define a coroutine, and async for to loop over asynchronous iterables with asynchronous iterators (implementing __aiter__ and __anext__, coroutine versions of __iter__ and __next__). To avoid conflict with the upcoming async keyword, the essential function asyncio.async() will be renamed asyncio.ensure_future() in Python 3.4.4. The await keyword will do something similar to yield from, but will only be allowed inside coroutines defined with async def—where the use of yield and yield from will be forbidden. With new syntax, the PEP establishes a clear separation between the legacy generators that evolved into coroutine-like objects and a new breed of native coroutine objects with better language support thanks to infrastructure like the async and await keywords and several new special methods. Coroutines are poised to become really important in the future of Python and the language should be adapted to better integrate them.

Experimenting with discrete event simulations is a great way to become comfortable with cooperative multitasking. Wikipedia’s “Discrete event simulation” article is a good place to start.¹⁷ A short tutorial about writing discrete event simulations by hand (no special libraries) is Ashish Gupta’s “Writing a Discrete Event Simulation: Ten Easy Lessons.” The code is in Java so it’s class-based and uses no coroutines, but can easily be ported to Python. Regardless of the code, the tutorial is a good short introduction to the terminology and components of a discrete event simulation. Converting Gupta’s examples to Python classes and then to classes leveraging coroutines is a good exercise.

For a ready-to-use library in Python, using coroutines, there is SimPy. Its online documentation explains:

SimPy is a process-based discrete-event simulation framework based on standard Python. Its event dispatcher is based on Python’s generators and can also be used for asynchronous networking or to implement multi-agent systems (with both simulated and real communication).

Coroutines are not so new in Python but they were pretty much tied to niche application domains before asynchronous programming frameworks started supporting them, starting with Tornado. The addition of yield from in Python 3.3 and asyncio in Python 3.4 will likely boost the adoption of coroutines—and of Python 3.4 itself. However, Python 3.4 is less than a year old as I write this—so once you watch David Beazley’s tutorials and cookbook examples on the subject, there isn’t a whole lot of content out there that goes deep into Python coroutine programming. For now.

Soapbox

Raise from lambda

In programming languages, keywords establish the basic rules of control flow and expression evaluation.

A keyword in a language is like a piece in a board game. In the language of Chess, the keywords are ♔, ♕, ♖, ♗, ♘, and ♙. In the game of Go, it’s ●.

Chess players have six different types of pieces to implement their plans, whereas Go players seem to have only one type of piece. However, in the semantics of Go, adjacent pieces form larger, solid pieces of many different shapes, with emerging properties. Some arrangements of Go pieces are indestructible. Go is more expressive than Chess. In Go there are 361 possible opening moves, and an estimated 1e+170 legal positions; for Chess, the numbers are 20 opening moves 1e+50 positions.

Adding a new piece to Chess would be a radical change. Adding a new keyword in a programming language is also a radical change. So it makes sense for language designers to be wary of introducing keywords.

Table 16-1. Number of keywords in programming languages

Keywords
Language
Comment

5

Smalltalk-80

Famous for its minimalist syntax.

25

Go

The language, not the game.

32

C

That’s ANSI C. C99 has 37 keywords, C11 has 44.

33

Python

Python 2.7 has 31 keywords; Python 1.5 had 28.

41

Ruby

Keywords may be used as identifiers (e.g., class is also a method name).

49

Java

As in C, the names of the primitive types (char, float, etc.) are reserved.

60

JavaScript

Includes all keywords from Java 1.0, many of which are unused.

65

PHP

Since PHP 5.3, seven keywords were introduced, including goto, trait, and yield.

85

C++

According to cppreference.com, C++11 added 10 keywords to the existing 75.

555

COBOL

I did not make this up. See this IBM ILE COBOL manual.

∞

Scheme

Anyone can define new keywords.

Python 3 added nonlocal, promoted None, True, and False to keyword status, and dropped print and exec. It’s very uncommon for a language to drop keywords as it evolves. Table 16-1 lists some languages, ordered by number of keywords.

Scheme inherited from Lisp a macro facility that allows anyone to create special forms adding new control structures and evaluation rules to the language. The user-defined identifiers of those forms are called “syntactic keywords.” The Scheme R5RS standard states “There are no reserved identifiers” (page 45 of the standard), but a typical implementation such as MIT/GNU Scheme comes with 34 syntactic keywords predefined, such as if, lambda, and define-syntax—the keyword that lets you conjure new keywords.¹⁸

Python is like Chess, and Scheme is like Go (the game).

Now, back to Python syntax. I think Guido is too conservative with keywords. It’s nice to have a small set of them, and adding new keywords potentially breaks a lot of code. But the use of else in loops reveals a recurring problem: the overloading of existing keywords when a new one would be a better choice. In the context of for, while, and try, a new then keyword would be preferable to abusing else.

The most serious manifestation of this problem is the overloading of def: it’s now used to define functions, generators, and coroutines—objects that are too different to share the same declaration syntax.¹⁹

The introduction of yield from is particularly worrying. Once again, I believe Python users would be best served by a new keyword. Even worse, this starts a new trend: chaining existing keywords to create new syntax, instead of adding sensible, descriptive keywords. I fear one day we may be poring over the meaning of raise from lambda.

Breaking News

As I wrap up this book’s technical review process, it seems Yury Selivanov’s PEP 492 — Coroutines with async and await syntax is on the way to being accepted for implementation in Python 3.5 already! The PEP has the support of Guido van Rossum and Victor Stinner, respectively the author and a leading maintainer of the asyncio library that would be the main use case for the new syntax. In response to Selivanov’s message to Python-ideas, Guido even hints at delaying the release of Python 3.5 so the PEP can be implemented.

Of course, this would put to rest most of the complaints I expressed in the preceding sections.

¹ You’ll only see this state in a multithreaded application—or if the generator object calls getgeneratorstate on itself, which is not useful.

² This example is inspired by a snippet from Jacob Holm in the Python-ideas list, message titled “Yield-From: Finalization guarantees.” Some variations appear later in the thread, and Holm further explains his thinking in message 003912.

³ There are several similar decorators published on the Web. This one is adapted from the ActiveState recipe Pipeline made of coroutines by Chaobin Tang, who in turn credits David Beazley.

⁴ There is an iPython extension called ipython-yf that enables evaluating yield from directly in the iPython console. It’s used to test asynchronous code and works with asyncio. It was submitted as a patch to Python 3.5 but was not accepted. See Issue #22412: Towards an asyncio-enabled command line in the Python bug tracker.

⁵ As I write this, there is an open PEP proposing the addition of await and async keywords: PEP 492 — Coroutines with async and await syntax.

⁶ Example 16-16 is a didactic example only. The itertools module already provides an optimized chain function written in C.

⁷ The picture in Figure 16-2 was inspired by a diagram by Paul Sokolovsky.

⁸ Message to Python-Dev: “PEP 380 (yield from a subgenerator) comments” (March 21, 2009).

⁹ In a message to Python-ideas on April 5, 2009, Nick Coghlan questioned whether the implicit priming done by yield from was a good idea.

¹⁰ Opening sentence of the “Motivation” section in PEP 342.

¹¹ See the official documentation for Simpy—not to be confused with the well-known but unrelated SymPy, a library for symbolic mathematics.

¹² I am not an expert in taxi fleet operations, so don’t take my numbers seriously. Exponential distributions are commonly used in DES. You’ll see some very short trips. Just pretend it’s a rainy day and some passengers are taking cabs just to go around the block—in an ideal city where there are cabs when it rains.

¹³ I was the passenger. I realized I forgot my wallet.

¹⁴ The verb “drive” is commonly used to describe the operation of a coroutine: the client code drives the coroutine by sending it values. In Example 16-21, the client code is what you type in the console.

¹⁵ This is typical of a discrete event simulation: the simulation clock is not incremented by a fixed amount on each loop, but advances according to the duration of each event completed.

¹⁶ Message to thread “Yield-From: Finalization guarantees” in the Python-ideas mailing list. The David Beazley tutorial Guido refers to is “A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency”.

¹⁷ Nowadays even tenured professors agree that Wikipedia is a good place to start studying pretty much any subject in computer science. Not true about other subjects, but for computer science, Wikipedia rocks.

¹⁸ “The Value Of Syntax?” is an interesting discussion about extensible syntax and programming language usability. The forum, Lambda the Ultimate, is a watering hole for programming language geeks.

¹⁹ A highly recommended post related to this issue in the context of JavaScript, Python, and other languages is “What Color Is Your Function?” by Bob Nystrom.

Chapter 17. Concurrency with Futures

The people bashing threads are typically system programmers which have in mind use cases that the typical application programmer will never encounter in her life. […] In 99% of the use cases an application programmer is likely to run into, the simple pattern of spawning a bunch of independent threads and collecting the results in a queue is everything one needs to know.¹

Michele Simionato, Python deep thinker

This chapter focuses on the concurrent.futures library introduced in Python 3.2, but also available for Python 2.5 and newer as the futures package on PyPI. This library encapsulates the pattern described by Michele Simionato in the preceding quote, making it almost trivial to use.

Here I also introduce the concept of “futures”—objects representing the asynchronous execution of an operation. This powerful idea is the foundation not only of concurrent.futures but also of the asyncio package, which we’ll cover in Chapter 18.

We’ll start with a motivating example.

Example: Web Downloads in Three Styles

To handle network I/O efficiently, you need concurrency, as it involves high latency—so instead of wasting CPU cycles waiting, it’s better to do something else until a response comes back from the network.

To make this last point with code, I wrote three simple programs to download images of 20 country flags from the Web. The first one, flags.py, runs sequentially: it only requests the next image when the previous one is downloaded and saved to disk. The other two scripts make concurrent downloads: they request all images practically at the same time, and save the files as they arrive. The flags_threadpool.py script uses the concurrent.futures package, while flags_asyncio.py uses asyncio.

Example 17-1 shows the result of running the three scripts, three times each. I also posted a 73s video on YouTube so you can watch them running while an OS X Finder window displays the flags as they are saved. The scripts are downloading images from flupy.org, which is behind a CDN, so you may see slower results in the first runs. The results in Example 17-1 were obtained after several runs, so the CDN cache was warm.

Example 17-1. Three typical runs of the scripts flags.py, flags_threadpool.py, and flags_asyncio.py

$ python3 flags.py
BD BR CD CN DE EG ET FR ID IN IR JP MX NG PH PK RU TR US VN
20 flags downloaded in 7.26s
$ python3 flags.py
BD BR CD CN DE EG ET FR ID IN IR JP MX NG PH PK RU TR US VN
20 flags downloaded in 7.20s
$ python3 flags.py
BD BR CD CN DE EG ET FR ID IN IR JP MX NG PH PK RU TR US VN
20 flags downloaded in 7.09s
$ python3 flags_threadpool.py
DE BD CN JP ID EG NG BR RU CD IR MX US PH FR PK VN IN ET TR
20 flags downloaded in 1.37s
$ python3 flags_threadpool.py
EG BR FR IN BD JP DE RU PK PH CD MX ID US NG TR CN VN ET IR
20 flags downloaded in 1.60s
$ python3 flags_threadpool.py
BD DE EG CN ID RU IN VN ET MX FR CD NG US JP TR PK BR IR PH
20 flags downloaded in 1.22s
$ python3 flags_asyncio.py
BD BR IN ID TR DE CN US IR PK PH FR RU NG VN ET MX EG JP CD
20 flags downloaded in 1.36s
$ python3 flags_asyncio.py
RU CN BR IN FR BD TR EG VN IR PH CD ET ID NG DE JP PK MX US
20 flags downloaded in 1.27s
$ python3 flags_asyncio.py
RU IN ID DE BR VN PK MX US IR ET EG NG BD FR CN JP PH CD TR
20 flags downloaded in 1.42s

The output for each run starts with the country codes of the flags as they are downloaded, and ends with a message stating the elapsed time.

It took flags.py an average 7.18s to download 20 images.

The average for flags_threadpool.py was 1.40s.

For flags_asyncio.py, 1.35 was the average time.

Note the order of the country codes: the downloads happened in a different order every time with the concurrent scripts.

The difference in performance between the concurrent scripts is not significant, but they are both more than five times faster than the sequential script—and this is just for a fairly small task. If you scale the task to hundreds of downloads, the concurrent scripts can outpace the sequential one by a factor or 20 or more.

Warning

While testing concurrent HTTP clients on the public Web you may inadvertently launch a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, or be suspected of doing so. In the case of Example 17-1, it’s OK to do it because those scripts are hardcoded to make only 20 requests. For testing nontrivial HTTP clients, you should set up your own test server. The 17-futures/countries/README.rst file in the Fluent Python code GitHub repository has instructions for setting a local Nginx server.

Now let’s study the implementations of two of the scripts tested in Example 17-1: flags.py and flags_threadpool.py. I will leave the third script, flags_asyncio.py, for Chapter 18, but I wanted to demonstrate all three together to make a point: regardless of the concurrency strategy you use—threads or asyncio—you’ll see vastly improved throughput over sequential code in I/O-bound applications, if you code it properly.

On to the code.

A Sequential Download Script

Example 17-2 is not very interesting, but we’ll reuse most of its code and settings to implement the concurrent scripts, so it deserves some attention.

Note

For clarity, there is no error handling in Example 17-2. We will deal with exceptions later, but here we want to focus on the basic structure of the code, to make it easier to contrast this script with the concurrent ones.

Example 17-2. flags.py: sequential download script; some functions will be reused by the other scripts

import os
import time
import sys

import requests

POP20_CC = ('CN IN US ID BR PK NG BD RU JP '
            'MX PH VN ET EG DE IR TR CD FR').split()

BASE_URL = 'http://flupy.org/data/flags'

DEST_DIR = 'downloads/'

def save_flag(img, filename):
    path = os.path.join(DEST_DIR, filename)
    with open(path, 'wb') as fp:
        fp.write(img)

def get_flag(cc):
    url = '{}/{cc}/{cc}.gif'.format(BASE_URL, cc=cc.lower())
    resp = requests.get(url)
    return resp.content

def show(text):
    print(text, end=' ')
    sys.stdout.flush()

def download_many(cc_list):
    for cc in sorted(cc_list):
        image = get_flag(cc)
        show(cc)
        save_flag(image, cc.lower() + '.gif')

    return len(cc_list)

def main(download_many):
    t0 = time.time()
    count = download_many(POP20_CC)
    elapsed = time.time() - t0
    msg = '\n{} flags downloaded in {:.2f}s'
    print(msg.format(count, elapsed))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main(download_many)

Import the requests library; it’s not part of the standard library, so by convention we import it after the standard library modules os, time, and sys, and separate it from them with a blank line.

List of the ISO 3166 country codes for the 20 most populous countries in order of decreasing population.

The website with the flag images.²

Local directory where the images are saved.

Simply save the img (a byte sequence) to filename in the DEST_DIR.

Given a country code, build the URL and download the image, returning the binary contents of the response.

Display a string and flush sys.stdout so we can see progress in a one-line display; this is needed because Python normally waits for a line break to flush the stdout buffer.

download_many is the key function to compare with the concurrent implementations.

Loop over the list of country codes in alphabetical order, to make it clear that the ordering is preserved in the output; return the number of country codes downloaded.

main records and reports the elapsed time after running download_many.

main must be called with the function that will make the downloads; we pass the download_many function as an argument so that main can be used as a library function with other implementations of download_many in the next examples.

Tip

The requests library by Kenneth Reitz is available on PyPI and is more powerful and easier to use than the urllib.request module from the Python 3 standard library. In fact, requests is considered a model Pythonic API. It is also compatible with Python 2.6 and up, while the urllib2 from Python 2 was moved and renamed in Python 3, so it’s more convenient to use requests regardless of the Python version you’re targeting.

There’s really nothing new to flags.py. It serves as a baseline for comparing the other scripts and I used it as a library to avoid redundant code when implementing them. Now let’s see a reimplementation using concurrent.futures.

Downloading with concurrent.futures

The main features of the concurrent.futures package are the ThreadPoolExecutor and ProcessPoolExecutor classes, which implement an interface that allows you to submit callables for execution in different threads or processes, respectively. The classes manage an internal pool of worker threads or processes, and a queue of tasks to be executed. But the interface is very high level and we don’t need to know about any of those details for a simple use case like our flag downloads.

Example 17-3 shows the easiest way to implement the downloads concurrently, using the ThreadPoolExecutor.map method.

Example 17-3. flags_threadpool.py: threaded download script using futures.ThreadPoolExecutor

from concurrent import futures

from flags import save_flag, get_flag, show, main

MAX_WORKERS = 20

def download_one(cc):
    image = get_flag(cc)
    show(cc)
    save_flag(image, cc.lower() + '.gif')
    return cc

def download_many(cc_list):
    workers = min(MAX_WORKERS, len(cc_list))
    with futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(workers) as executor:
        res = executor.map(download_one, sorted(cc_list))

    return len(list(res))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main(download_many)

Reuse some functions from the flags module (Example 17-2).

Maximum number of threads to be used in the ThreadPoolExecutor.

Function to download a single image; this is what each thread will execute.

Set the number of worker threads: use the smaller number between the maximum we want to allow (MAX_WORKERS) and the actual items to be processed, so no unnecessary threads are created.

Instantiate the ThreadPoolExecutor with that number of worker threads; the executor.__exit__ method will call executor.shutdown(wait=True), which will block until all threads are done.

The map method is similar to the map built-in, except that the download_one function will be called concurrently from multiple threads; it returns a generator that can be iterated over to retrieve the value returned by each function.

Return the number of results obtained; if any of the threaded calls raised an exception, that exception would be raised here as the implicit next() call tried to retrieve the corresponding return value from the iterator.

Call the main function from the flags module, passing the enhanced version of download_many.

Note that the download_one function from Example 17-3 is essentially the body of the for loop in the download_many function from Example 17-2. This is a common refactoring when writing concurrent code: turning the body of a sequential for loop into a function to be called concurrently.

The library is called concurrency.futures yet there are no futures to be seen in Example 17-3, so you may be wondering where they are. The next section explains.

Where Are the Futures?

Futures are essential components in the internals of concurrent.futures and of asyncio, but as users of these libraries we sometimes don’t see them. Example 17-3 leverages futures behind the scenes, but the code I wrote does not touch them directly. This section is an overview of futures, with an example that shows them in action.

As of Python 3.4, there are two classes named Future in the standard library: concurrent.futures.Future and asyncio.Future. They serve the same purpose: an instance of either Future class represents a deferred computation that may or may not have completed. This is similar to the Deferred class in Twisted, the Future class in Tornado, and Promise objects in various JavaScript libraries.

Futures encapsulate pending operations so that they can be put in queues, their state of completion can be queried, and their results (or exceptions) can be retrieved when available.

An important thing to know about futures in general is that you and I should not create them: they are meant to be instantiated exclusively by the concurrency framework, be it concurrent.futures or asyncio. It’s easy to understand why: a Future represents something that will eventually happen, and the only way to be sure that something will happen is to schedule its execution. Therefore, concurrent.futures.Future instances are created only as the result of scheduling something for execution with a concurrent.futures.Executor subclass. For example, the Executor.submit() method takes a callable, schedules it to run, and returns a future.

Client code is not supposed to change the state of a future: the concurrency framework changes the state of a future when the computation it represents is done, and we can’t control when that happens.

Both types of Future have a .done() method that is nonblocking and returns a Boolean that tells you whether the callable linked to that future has executed or not. Instead of asking whether a future is done, client code usually asks to be notified. That’s why both Future classes have an .add_done_callback() method: you give it a callable, and the callable will be invoked with the future as the single argument when the future is done.

There is also a .result() method, which works the same in both classes when the future is done: it returns the result of the callable, or re-raises whatever exception might have been thrown when the callable was executed. However, when the future is not done, the behavior of the result method is very different between the two flavors of Future. In a concurrency.futures.Future instance, invoking f.result() will block the caller’s thread until the result is ready. An optional timeout argument can be passed, and if the future is not done in the specified time, a TimeoutError exception is raised. In “asyncio.Future: Nonblocking by Design”, we’ll see that the asyncio.Future.result method does not support timeout, and the preferred way to get the result of futures in that library is to use yield from—which doesn’t work with concurrency.futures.Future instances.

Several functions in both libraries return futures; others use them in their implementation in a way that is transparent to the user. An example of the latter is the Executor.map we saw in Example 17-3: it returns an iterator in which __next__ calls the result method of each future, so what we get are the results of the futures, and not the futures themselves.

To get a practical look at futures, we can rewrite Example 17-3 to use the concurrent.futures.as_completed function, which takes an iterable of futures and returns an iterator that yields futures as they are done.

Using futures.as_completed requires changes to the download_many function only. The higher-level executor.map call is replaced by two for loops: one to create and schedule the futures, the other to retrieve their results. While we are at it, we’ll add a few print calls to display each future before and after it’s done. Example 17-4 shows the code for a new download_many function. The code for download_many grew from 5 to 17 lines, but now we get to inspect the mysterious futures. The remaining functions are the same as in Example 17-3.

Example 17-4. flags_threadpool_ac.py: replacing executor.map with executor.submit and futures.as_completed in the download_many function

def download_many(cc_list):
    cc_list = cc_list[:5]
    with futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=3) as executor:
        to_do = []
        for cc in sorted(cc_list):
            future = executor.submit(download_one, cc)
            to_do.append(future)
            msg = 'Scheduled for {}: {}'
            print(msg.format(cc, future))

        results = []
        for future in futures.as_completed(to_do):
            res = future.result()
            msg = '{} result: {!r}'
            print(msg.format(future, res))
            results.append(res)

    return len(results)

For this demonstration, use only the top five most populous countries.

Hardcode max_workers to 3 so we can observe pending futures in the output.

Iterate over country codes alphabetically, to make it clear that results arrive out of order.

executor.submit schedules the callable to be executed, and returns a future representing this pending operation.

Store each future so we can later retrieve them with as_completed.

Display a message with the country code and the respective future.

as_completed yields futures as they are completed.

Get the result of this future.

Display the future and its result.

Note that the future.result() call will never block in this example because the future is coming out of as_completed. Example 17-5 shows the output of one run of Example 17-4.

Example 17-5. Output of flags_threadpool_ac.py

$ python3 flags_threadpool_ac.py
Scheduled for BR: <Future at 0x100791518 state=running>
Scheduled for CN: <Future at 0x100791710 state=running>
Scheduled for ID: <Future at 0x100791a90 state=running>
Scheduled for IN: <Future at 0x101807080 state=pending>
Scheduled for US: <Future at 0x101807128 state=pending>
CN <Future at 0x100791710 state=finished returned str> result: 'CN'
BR ID <Future at 0x100791518 state=finished returned str> result: 'BR'
<Future at 0x100791a90 state=finished returned str> result: 'ID'
IN <Future at 0x101807080 state=finished returned str> result: 'IN'
US <Future at 0x101807128 state=finished returned str> result: 'US'

5 flags downloaded in 0.70s

The futures are scheduled in alphabetical order; the repr() of a future shows its state: the first three are running, because there are three worker threads.

The last two futures are pending, waiting for worker threads.

The first CN here is the output of download_one in a worker thread; the rest of the line is the output of download_many.

Here two threads output codes before download_many in the main thread can display the result of the first thread.

Note

If you run flags_threadpool_ac.py several times, you’ll see the order of the results varying. Increasing the max_workers argument to 5 will increase the variation in the order of the results. Decreasing it to 1 will make this code run sequentially, and the order of the results will always be the order of the submit calls.

We saw two variants of the download script using concurrent.futures: Example 17-3 with ThreadPoolExecutor.map and Example 17-4 with futures.as_completed. If you are curious about the code for flags_asyncio.py, you may peek at Example 18-5 in Chapter 18.

Strictly speaking, none of the concurrent scripts we tested so far can perform downloads in parallel. The concurrent.futures examples are limited by the GIL, and the flags_asyncio.py is single-threaded.

At this point, you may have questions about the informal benchmarks we just did:

How can flags_threadpool.py perform 5× faster than flags.py if Python threads are limited by a Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) that only lets one thread run at any time?

How can flags_asyncio.py perform 5× faster than flags.py when both are single threaded?

I will answer the second question in “Running Circles Around Blocking Calls”.

Read on to understand why the GIL is nearly harmless with I/O-bound processing.

Blocking I/O and the GIL

The CPython interpreter is not thread-safe internally, so it has a Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), which allows only one thread at a time to execute Python bytecodes. That’s why a single Python process usually cannot use multiple CPU cores at the same time.³

When we write Python code, we have no control over the GIL, but a built-in function or an extension written in C can release the GIL while running time-consuming tasks. In fact, a Python library coded in C can manage the GIL, launch its own OS threads, and take advantage of all available CPU cores. This complicates the code of the library considerably, and most library authors don’t do it.

However, all standard library functions that perform blocking I/O release the GIL when waiting for a result from the OS. This means Python programs that are I/O bound can benefit from using threads at the Python level: while one Python thread is waiting for a response from the network, the blocked I/O function releases the GIL so another thread can run.

That’s why David Beazley says: “Python threads are great at doing nothing.”⁴

Tip

Every blocking I/O function in the Python standard library releases the GIL, allowing other threads to run. The time.sleep() function also releases the GIL. Therefore, Python threads are perfectly usable in I/O-bound applications, despite the GIL.

Now let’s take a brief look at a simple way to work around the GIL for CPU-bound jobs using concurrent.futures.

Launching Processes with concurrent.futures

The concurrent.futures documentation page is subtitled “Launching parallel tasks”. The package does enable truly parallel computations because it supports distributing work among multiple Python processes using the ProcessPoolExecutor class—thus bypassing the GIL and leveraging all available CPU cores, if you need to do CPU-bound processing.

Both ProcessPoolExecutor and ThreadPoolExecutor implement the generic Executor interface, so it’s very easy to switch from a thread-based to a process-based solution using concurrent.futures.

There is no advantage in using a ProcessPoolExecutor for the flags download example or any I/O-bound job. It’s easy to verify this; just change these lines in Example 17-3:

def download_many(cc_list):
    workers = min(MAX_WORKERS, len(cc_list))
    with futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(workers) as executor:

To this:

def download_many(cc_list):
    with futures.ProcessPoolExecutor() as executor:

For simple uses, the only notable difference between the two concrete executor classes is that ThreadPoolExecutor.__init__ requires a max_workers argument setting the number of threads in the pool. That is an optional argument in ProcessPoolExecutor, and most of the time we don’t use it—the default is the number of CPUs returned by os.cpu_count(). This makes sense: for CPU-bound processing, it makes no sense to ask for more workers than CPUs. On the other hand, for I/O-bound processing, you may use 10, 100, or 1,000 threads in a ThreadPoolExecutor; the best number depends on what you’re doing and the available memory, and finding the optimal number will require careful testing.

A few tests revealed that the average time to download the 20 flags increased to 1.8s with a ProcessPoolExecutor—compared to 1.4s in the original ThreadPoolExecutor version. The main reason for this is likely to be the limit of four concurrent downloads on my four-core machine, against 20 workers in the thread pool version.

The value of ProcessPoolExecutor is in CPU-intensive jobs. I did some performance tests with a couple of CPU-bound scripts:

arcfour_futures.py

Encrypt and decrypt a dozen byte arrays with sizes from 149 KB to 384 KB using a pure-Python implementation of the RC4 algorithm (listing: Example A-7).

sha_futures.py

Compute the SHA-256 hash of a dozen 1 MB byte arrays with the standard library hashlib package, which uses the OpenSSL library (listing: Example A-9).

Neither of these scripts do I/O except to display summary results. They build and process all their data in memory, so I/O does not interfere with their execution time.

Table 17-1 shows the average timings I got after 64 runs of the RC4 example and 48 runs of the SHA example. The timings include the time to actually spawn the worker processes.

Table 17-1. Time and speedup factor for the RC4 and SHA examples with one to four workers on an Intel Core i7 2.7 GHz quad-core machine, using Python 3.4

Workers
RC4 time
RC4 factor
SHA time
SHA factor

1

11.48s

1.00x

22.66s

1.00x

2

8.65s

1.33x

14.90s

1.52x

3

6.04s

1.90x

11.91s

1.90x

4

5.58s

2.06x

10.89s

2.08x

In summary, for cryptographic algorithms, you can expect to double the performance by spawning four worker processes with a ProcessPoolExecutor, if you have four CPU cores.

For the pure-Python RC4 example, you can get results 3.8 times faster if you use PyPy and four workers, compared with CPython and four workers. That’s a speedup of 7.8 times in relation to the baseline of one worker with CPython in Table 17-1.

Tip

If you are doing CPU-intensive work in Python, you should try PyPy. The arcfour_futures.py example ran from 3.8 to 5.1 times faster using PyPy, depending on the number of workers used. I tested with PyPy 2.4.0, which is compatible with Python 3.2.5, so it has concurrent.futures in the standard library.

Now let’s investigate the behavior of a thread pool with a demonstration program that launches a pool with three workers, running five callables that output timestamped messages.

Experimenting with Executor.map

The simplest way to run several callables concurrently is with the Executor.map function we first saw in Example 17-3. Example 17-6 is a script to demonstrate how Executor.map works in some detail. Its output appears in Example 17-7.

Example 17-6. demo_executor_map.py: Simple demonstration of the map method of ThreadPoolExecutor

from time import sleep, strftime
from concurrent import futures

def display(*args):
    print(strftime('[%H:%M:%S]'), end=' ')
    print(*args)

def loiter(n):
    msg = '{}loiter({}): doing nothing for {}s...'
    display(msg.format('\t'*n, n, n))
    sleep(n)
    msg = '{}loiter({}): done.'
    display(msg.format('\t'*n, n))
    return n * 10

def main():
    display('Script starting.')
    executor = futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=3)
    results = executor.map(loiter, range(5))
    display('results:', results)
    display('Waiting for individual results:')
    for i, result in enumerate(results):
        display('result {}: {}'.format(i, result))

main()

This function simply prints whatever arguments it gets, preceded by a timestamp in the format [HH:MM:SS].

loiter does nothing except display a message when it starts, sleep for n seconds, then display a message when it ends; tabs are used to indent the messages according to the value of n.

loiter returns n * 10 so we can see how to collect results.

Create a ThreadPoolExecutor with three threads.

Submit five tasks to the executor (because there are only three threads, only three of those tasks will start immediately: the calls loiter(0), loiter(1), and loiter(2)); this is a nonblocking call.

Immediately display the results of invoking executor.map: it’s a generator, as the output in Example 17-7 shows.

The enumerate call in the for loop will implicitly invoke next(results), which in turn will invoke _f.result() on the (internal) _f future representing the first call, loiter(0). The result method will block until the future is done, therefore each iteration in this loop will have to wait for the next result to be ready.

I encourage you to run Example 17-6 and see the display being updated incrementally. While you’re at it, play with the max_workers argument for the ThreadPoolExecutor and with the range function that produces the arguments for the executor.map call—or replace it with lists of handpicked values to create different delays.

Example 17-7 shows a sample run of Example 17-6.

Example 17-7. Sample run of demo_executor_map.py from Example 17-6

$ python3 demo_executor_map.py
[15:56:50] Script starting.
[15:56:50] loiter(0): doing nothing for 0s...
[15:56:50] loiter(0): done.
[15:56:50]      loiter(1): doing nothing for 1s...
[15:56:50]              loiter(2): doing nothing for 2s...
[15:56:50] results: <generator object result_iterator at 0x106517168>
[15:56:50]                      loiter(3): doing nothing for 3s...
[15:56:50] Waiting for individual results:
[15:56:50] result 0: 0
[15:56:51]      loiter(1): done.
[15:56:51]                              loiter(4): doing nothing for 4s...
[15:56:51] result 1: 10
[15:56:52]              loiter(2): done.
[15:56:52] result 2: 20
[15:56:53]                      loiter(3): done.
[15:56:53] result 3: 30
[15:56:55]                              loiter(4): done.
[15:56:55] result 4: 40

This run started at 15:56:50.

The first thread executes loiter(0), so it will sleep for 0s and return even before the second thread has a chance to start, but YMMV.⁵

loiter(1) and loiter(2) start immediately (because the thread pool has three workers, it can run three functions concurrently).

This shows that the results returned by executor.map is a generator; nothing so far would block, regardless of the number of tasks and the max_workers setting.

Because loiter(0) is done, the first worker is now available to start the fourth thread for loiter(3).

This is where execution may block, depending on the parameters given to the loiter calls: the __next__ method of the results generator must wait until the first future is complete. In this case, it won’t block because the call to loiter(0) finished before this loop started. Note that everything up to this point happened within the same second: 15:56:50.

loiter(1) is done one second later, at 15:56:51. The thread is freed to start loiter(4).

The result of loiter(1) is shown: 10. Now the for loop will block waiting for the result of loiter(2).

The pattern repeats: loiter(2) is done, its result is shown; same with loiter(3).

There is a 2s delay until loiter(4) is done, because it started at 15:56:51 and did nothing for 4s.

The Executor.map function is easy to use but it has a feature that may or may not be helpful, depending on your needs: it returns the results exactly in the same order as the calls are started: if the first call takes 10s to produce a result, and the others take 1s each, your code will block for 10s as it tries to retrieve the first result of the generator returned by map. After that, you’ll get the remaining results without blocking because they will be done. That’s OK when you must have all the results before proceeding, but often it’s preferable to get the results as they are ready, regardless of the order they were submitted. To do that, you need a combination of the Executor.submit method and the futures.as_completed function, as we saw in Example 17-4. We’ll come back to this technique in “Using futures.as_completed”.

Tip

The combination of executor.submit and futures.as_completed is more flexible than executor.map because you can submit different callables and arguments, while executor.map is designed to run the same callable on the different arguments. In addition, the set of futures you pass to futures.as_completed may come from more than one executor—perhaps some were created by a ThreadPoolExecutor instance while others are from a ProcessPoolExecutor.

In the next section, we will resume the flag download examples with new requirements that will force us to iterate over the results of futures.as_completed instead of using executor.map.

Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling

As mentioned, the scripts in “Example: Web Downloads in Three Styles” have no error handling to make them easier to read and to contrast the structure of the three approaches: sequential, threaded, and asynchronous.

In order to test the handling of a variety of error conditions, I created the flags2 examples:

flags2_common.py

This module contains common functions and settings used by all flags2 examples, including a main function, which takes care of command-line parsing, timing, and reporting results. This is really support code, not directly relevant to the subject of this chapter, so the source code is in Appendix A, Example A-10.

flags2_sequential.py

A sequential HTTP client with proper error handling and progress bar display. Its download_one function is also used by flags2_threadpool.py.

flags2_threadpool.py

Concurrent HTTP client based on futures.ThreadPoolExecutor to demonstrate error handling and integration of the progress bar.

flags2_asyncio.py

Same functionality as previous example but implemented with asyncio and aiohttp. This will be covered in “Enhancing the asyncio downloader Script”, in Chapter 18.

Be Careful When Testing Concurrent Clients

When testing concurrent HTTP clients on public HTTP servers, you may generate many requests per second, and that’s how denial-of-service (DoS) attacks are made. We don’t want to attack anyone, just learn how to build high-performance clients. Carefully throttle your clients when hitting public servers. For high-concurrency experiments, set up a local HTTP server for testing. Instructions for doing it are in the README.rst file in the 17-futures/countries/ directory of the Fluent Python code repository.

The most visible feature of the flags2 examples is that they have an animated, text-mode progress bar implemented with the TQDM package. I posted a 108s video on YouTube to show the progress bar and contrast the speed of the three flags2 scripts. In the video, I start with the sequential download, but I interrupt it after 32s because it was going to take more than 5 minutes to hit on 676 URLs and get 194 flags; I then run the threaded and asyncio scripts three times each, and every time they complete the job in 6s or less (i.e., more than 60 times faster). Figure 17-1 shows two screenshots: during and after running flags2_threadpool.py.

Figure 17-1. Top-left: flags2_threadpool.py running with live progress bar generated by tqdm; bottom-right: same terminal window after the script is finished.

TQDM is very easy to use, the simplest example appears in an animated .gif in the project’s README.md. If you type the following code in the Python console after installing the tqdm package, you’ll see an animated progress bar were the comment is:

>>> import time
>>> from tqdm import tqdm
>>> for i in tqdm(range(1000)):
...     time.sleep(.01)
...
>>> # -> progress bar will appear here <-

Besides the neat effect, the tqdm function is also interesting conceptually: it consumes any iterable and produces an iterator which, while it’s consumed, displays the progress bar and estimates the remaining time to complete all iterations. To compute that estimate, tqdm needs to get an iterable that has a len, or receive as a second argument the expected number of items. Integrating TQDM with our flags2 examples provide an opportunity to look deeper into how the concurrent scripts actually work, by forcing us to use the futures.as_completed and the asyncio.as_completed functions so that tqdm can display progress as each future is completed.

The other feature of the flags2 example is a command-line interface. All three scripts accept the same options, and you can see them by running any of the scripts with the -h option. Example 17-8 shows the help text.

Example 17-8. Help screen for the scripts in the flags2 series

$ python3 flags2_threadpool.py -h
usage: flags2_threadpool.py [-h] [-a] [-e] [-l N] [-m CONCURRENT] [-s LABEL]
                            [-v]
                            [CC [CC ...]]

Download flags for country codes. Default: top 20 countries by population.

positional arguments:
  CC                    country code or 1st letter (eg. B for BA...BZ)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -a, --all             get all available flags (AD to ZW)
  -e, --every           get flags for every possible code (AA...ZZ)
  -l N, --limit N       limit to N first codes
  -m CONCURRENT, --max_req CONCURRENT
                        maximum concurrent requests (default=30)
  -s LABEL, --server LABEL
                        Server to hit; one of DELAY, ERROR, LOCAL, REMOTE
                        (default=LOCAL)
  -v, --verbose         output detailed progress info

All arguments are optional. The most important arguments are discussed next.

One option you can’t ignore is -s/--server: it lets you choose which HTTP server and base URL will be used in the test. You can pass one of four strings to determine where the script will look for the flags (the strings are case insensitive):

LOCAL

Use http://localhost:8001/flags; this is the default. You should configure a local HTTP server to answer at port 8001. I used Nginx for my tests. The README.rst file for this chapter’s example code explains how to install and configure it.

REMOTE

Use http://flupy.org/data/flags; that is a public website owned by me, hosted on a shared server. Please do not pound it with too many concurrent requests. The flupy.org domain is handled by a free account on the Cloudflare CDN so you may notice that the first downloads are slower, but they get faster when the CDN cache warms up.⁶

DELAY

Use http://localhost:8002/flags; a proxy delaying HTTP responses should be listening at port 8002. I used a Mozilla Vaurien in front of my local Nginx to introduce delays. The previously mentioned README.rst file has instructions for running a Vaurien proxy.

ERROR

Use http://localhost:8003/flags; a proxy introducing HTTP errors and delaying responses should be installed at port 8003. I used a different Vaurien configuration for this.

Warning

The LOCAL option only works if you configure and start a local HTTP server on port 8001. The DELAY and ERROR options require proxies listening on ports 8002 and 8003. Configuring Nginx and Mozilla Vaurien to enable these options is explained in the 17-futures/countries/README.rst file in the Fluent Python code repository on GitHub.

By default, each flags2 script will fetch the flags of the 20 most populous countries from the LOCAL server (http://localhost:8001/flags) using a default number of concurrent connections, which varies from script to script. Example 17-9 shows a sample run of the flags2_sequential.py script using all defaults.

Example 17-9. Running flags2_sequential.py with all defaults: LOCAL site, top-20 flags, 1 concurrent connection

$ python3 flags2_sequential.py
LOCAL site: http://localhost:8001/flags
Searching for 20 flags: from BD to VN
1 concurrent connection will be used.
--------------------
20 flags downloaded.
Elapsed time: 0.10s

You can select which flags will be downloaded in several ways. Example 17-10 shows how to download all flags with country codes starting with the letters A, B, or C.

Example 17-10. Run flags2_threadpool.py to fetch all flags with country codes prefixes A, B, or C from DELAY server

$ python3 flags2_threadpool.py -s DELAY a b c
DELAY site: http://localhost:8002/flags
Searching for 78 flags: from AA to CZ
30 concurrent connections will be used.
--------------------
43 flags downloaded.
35 not found.
Elapsed time: 1.72s

Regardless of how the country codes are selected, the number of flags to fetch can be limited with the -l/--limit option. Example 17-11 demonstrates how to run exactly 100 requests, combining the -a option to get all flags with -l 100.

Example 17-11. Run flags2_asyncio.py to get 100 flags (-al 100) from the ERROR server, using 100 concurrent requests (-m 100)

$ python3 flags2_asyncio.py -s ERROR -al 100 -m 100
ERROR site: http://localhost:8003/flags
Searching for 100 flags: from AD to LK
100 concurrent connections will be used.
--------------------
73 flags downloaded.
27 errors.
Elapsed time: 0.64s

That’s the user interface of the flags2 examples. Let’s see how they are implemented.

Error Handling in the flags2 Examples

The common strategy adopted in all three examples to deal with HTTP errors is that 404 errors (Not Found) are handled by the function in charge of downloading a single file (download_one). Any other exception propagates to be handled by the download_many function.

Again, we’ll start by studying the sequential code, which is easier to follow—and mostly reused by the thread pool script. Example 17-12 shows the functions that perform the actual downloads in the flags2_sequential.py and flags2_threadpool.py scripts.

Example 17-12. flags2_sequential.py: basic functions in charge of downloading; both are reused in flags2_threadpool.py

def get_flag(base_url, cc):
    url = '{}/{cc}/{cc}.gif'.format(base_url, cc=cc.lower())
    resp = requests.get(url)
    if resp.status_code != 200:
        resp.raise_for_status()
    return resp.content

def download_one(cc, base_url, verbose=False):
    try:
        image = get_flag(base_url, cc)
    except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as exc:
        res = exc.response
        if res.status_code == 404:
            status = HTTPStatus.not_found
            msg = 'not found'
        else:
            raise
    else:
        save_flag(image, cc.lower() + '.gif')
        status = HTTPStatus.ok
        msg = 'OK'

    if verbose:
        print(cc, msg)

    return Result(status, cc)

get_flag does no error handling, it uses requests.Response.raise_for_status to raise an exception for any HTTP code other than 200.

download_one catches requests.exceptions.HTTPError to handle HTTP code 404 specifically…

…by setting its local status to HTTPStatus.not_found; HTTPStatus is an Enum imported from flags2_common (Example A-10).

Any other HTTPError exception is re-raised; other exceptions will just propagate to the caller.

If the -v/--verbose command-line option is set, the country code and status message will be displayed; this how you’ll see progress in the verbose mode.

The Result namedtuple returned by download_one will have a status field with a value of HTTPStatus.not_found or HTTPStatus.ok.

Example 17-13 lists the sequential version of the download_many function. This code is straightforward, but its worth studying to contrast with the concurrent versions coming up. Focus on how it reports progress, handles errors, and tallies downloads.

Example 17-13. flags2_sequential.py: the sequential implementation of download_many

def download_many(cc_list, base_url, verbose, max_req):
    counter = collections.Counter()
    cc_iter = sorted(cc_list)
    if not verbose:
        cc_iter = tqdm.tqdm(cc_iter)
    for cc in cc_iter:
        try:
            res = download_one(cc, base_url, verbose)
        except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as exc:
            error_msg = 'HTTP error {res.status_code} - {res.reason}'
            error_msg = error_msg.format(res=exc.response)
        except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError as exc:
            error_msg = 'Connection error'
        else:
            error_msg = ''
            status = res.status

        if error_msg:
            status = HTTPStatus.error
        counter[status] += 1
        if verbose and error_msg:
            print('*** Error for {}: {}'.format(cc, error_msg))

    return counter

This Counter will tally the different download outcomes: HTTPStatus.ok, HTTPStatus.not_found, or HTTPStatus.error.

cc_iter holds the list of the country codes received as arguments, ordered alphabetically.

If not running in verbose mode, cc_iter is passed to the tqdm function, which will return an iterator that yields the items in cc_iter while also displaying the animated progress bar.

This for loop iterates over cc_iter and…

…performs the download by successive calls to download_one.

HTTP-related exceptions raised by get_flag and not handled by download_one are handled here.

Other network-related exceptions are handled here. Any other exception will abort the script, because the flags2_common.main function that calls download_many has no try/except.

If no exception escaped download_one, then the status is retrieved from the HTTPStatus namedtuple returned by download_one.

If there was an error, set the local status accordingly.

Increment the counter by using the value of the HTTPStatus Enum as key.

If running in verbose mode, display the error message for the current country code, if any.

Return the counter so that the main function can display the numbers in its final report.

We’ll now study the refactored thread pool example, flags2_threadpool.py.

Using futures.as_completed

In order to integrate the TQDM progress bar and handle errors on each request, the flags2_threadpool.py script uses futures.ThreadPoolExecutor with the futures.as_completed function we’ve already seen. Example 17-14 is the full listing of flags2_threadpool.py. Only the download_many function is implemented; the other functions are reused from the flags2_common and flags2_sequential modules.

Example 17-14. flags2_threadpool.py: full listing

import collections
from concurrent import futures

import requests
import tqdm

from flags2_common import main, HTTPStatus
from flags2_sequential import download_one

DEFAULT_CONCUR_REQ = 30
MAX_CONCUR_REQ = 1000

def download_many(cc_list, base_url, verbose, concur_req):
    counter = collections.Counter()
    with futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=concur_req) as executor:
        to_do_map = {}
        for cc in sorted(cc_list):
            future = executor.submit(download_one,
                            cc, base_url, verbose)
            to_do_map[future] = cc
        done_iter = futures.as_completed(to_do_map)
        if not verbose:
            done_iter = tqdm.tqdm(done_iter, total=len(cc_list))
        for future in done_iter:
            try:
                res = future.result()
            except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as exc:
                error_msg = 'HTTP {res.status_code} - {res.reason}'
                error_msg = error_msg.format(res=exc.response)
            except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError as exc:
                error_msg = 'Connection error'
            else:
                error_msg = ''
                status = res.status

            if error_msg:
                status = HTTPStatus.error
            counter[status] += 1
            if verbose and error_msg:
                cc = to_do_map[future]
                print('*** Error for {}: {}'.format(cc, error_msg))

    return counter

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main(download_many, DEFAULT_CONCUR_REQ, MAX_CONCUR_REQ)

Import the progress-bar display library.

Import one function and one Enum from the flags2_common module.

Reuse the download_one from flags2_sequential (Example 17-12).

If the -m/--max_req command-line option is not given, this will be the maximum number of concurrent requests, implemented as the size of the thread pool; the actual number may be smaller, if the number of flags to download is smaller.

MAX_CONCUR_REQ caps the maximum number of concurrent requests regardless of the number of flags to download or the -m/--max_req command-line option; it’s a safety precaution.

Create the executor with max_workers set to concur_req, computed by the main function as the smaller of: MAX_CONCUR_REQ, the length of cc_list, and the value of the -m/--max_req command-line option. This avoids creating more threads than necessary.

This dict will map each Future instance—representing one download—with the respective country code for error reporting.

Iterate over the list of country codes in alphabetical order. The order of the results will depend on the timing of the HTTP responses more than anything, but if the size of the thread pool (given by concur_req) is much smaller than len(cc_list), you may notice the downloads batched alphabetically.

Each call to executor.submit schedules the execution of one callable and returns a Future instance. The first argument is the callable, the rest are the arguments it will receive.

Store the future and the country code in the dict.

futures.as_completed returns an iterator that yields futures as they are done.

If not in verbose mode, wrap the result of as_completed with the tqdm function to display the progress bar; because done_iter has no len, we must tell tqdm what is the expected number of items as the total= argument, so tqdm can estimate the work remaining.

Iterate over the futures as they are completed.

Calling the result method on a future either returns the value returned by the callable, or raises whatever exception was caught when the callable was executed. This method may block waiting for a resolution, but not in this example because as_completed only returns futures that are done.

Handle the potential exceptions; the rest of this function is identical to the sequential version of download_many (Example 17-13), except for the next callout.

To provide context for the error message, retrieve the country code from the to_do_map using the current future as key. This was not necessary in the sequential version because we were iterating over the list of country codes, so we had the current cc; here we are iterating over the futures.

Example 17-14 uses an idiom that’s very useful with futures.as_completed: building a dict to map each future to other data that may be useful when the future is completed. Here the to_do_map maps each future to the country code assigned to it. This makes it easy to do follow-up processing with the result of the futures, despite the fact that they are produced out of order.

Python threads are well suited for I/O-intensive applications, and the concurrent.futures package makes them trivially simple to use for certain use cases. This concludes our basic introduction to concurrent.futures. Let’s now discuss alternatives for when ThreadPoolExecutor or ProcessPoolExecutor are not suitable.

Threading and Multiprocessing Alternatives

Python has supported threads since its release 0.9.8 (1993); concurrent.futures is just the latest way of using them. In Python 3, the original thread module was deprecated in favor of the higher-level threading module.⁷ If futures.ThreadPoolExecutor is not flexible enough for a certain job, you may need to build your own solution out of basic threading components such as Thread, Lock, Semaphore, etc.—possibly using the thread-safe queues of the queue module for passing data between threads. Those moving parts are encapsulated by futures.ThreadPoolExecutor.

For CPU-bound work, you need to sidestep the GIL by launching multiple processes. The futures.ProcessPoolExecutor is the easiest way to do it. But again, if your use case is complex, you’ll need more advanced tools. The multiprocessing package emulates the threading API but delegates jobs to multiple processes. For simple programs, multiprocessing can replace threading with few changes. But multiprocessing also offers facilities to solve the biggest challenge faced by collaborating processes: how to pass around data.

Chapter Summary

We started the chapter by comparing two concurrent HTTP clients with a sequential one, demonstrating significant performance gains over the sequential script.

After studying the first example based on concurrent.futures, we took a closer look at future objects, either instances of concurrent.futures.Future, or asyncio.Future, emphasizing what these classes have in common (their differences will be emphasized in Chapter 18). We saw how to create futures by calling Executor.submit(…), and iterate over completed futures with concurrent.futures.as_completed(…).

Next, we saw why Python threads are well suited for I/O-bound applications, despite the GIL: every standard library I/O function written in C releases the GIL, so while a given thread is waiting for I/O, the Python scheduler can switch to another thread. We then discussed the use of multiple processes with the concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor class, to go around the GIL and use multiple CPU cores to run cryptographic algorithms, achieving speedups of more than 100% when using four workers.

In the following section, we took a close look at how the concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor works, with a didactic example launching tasks that did nothing for a few seconds, except displaying their status with a timestamp.

Next we went back to the flag downloading examples. Enhancing them with a progress bar and proper error handling prompted further exploration of the future.as_completed generator function showing a common pattern: storing futures in a dict to link further information to them when submitting, so that we can use that information when the future comes out of the as_completed iterator.

We concluded the coverage of concurrency with threads and processes with a brief reminder of the lower-level, but more flexible threading and multiprocessing modules, which represent the traditional way of leveraging threads and processes in Python.

Further Reading

The concurrent.futures package was contributed by Brian Quinlan, who presented it in a great talk titled “The Future Is Soon!” at PyCon Australia 2010. Quinlan’s talk has no slides; he shows what the library does by typing code directly in the Python console. As a motivating example, the presentation features a short video with XKCD cartoonist/programmer Randall Munroe making an unintended DOS attack on Google Maps to build a colored map of driving times around his city. The formal introduction to the library is PEP 3148 - futures - execute computations asynchronously. In the PEP, Quinlan wrote that the concurrent.futures library was “heavily influenced by the Java java.util.concurrent package.”

Parallel Programming with Python (Packt), by Jan Palach, covers several tools for concurrent programming, including the concurrent.futures, threading, and multiprocessing modules. It goes beyond the standard library to discuss Celery, a task queue used to distribute work across threads and processes, even on different machines. In the Django community, Celery is probably the most widely used system to offload heavy tasks such as PDF generation to other processes, thus avoiding delays in producing an HTTP response.

In the Beazley and Jones Python Cookbook, 3E (O’Reilly) there are recipes using concurrent.futures starting with “Recipe 11.12. Understanding Event-Driven I/O.” “Recipe 12.7. Creating a Thread Pool” shows a simple TCP echo server, and “Recipe 12.8. Performing Simple Parallel Programming” offers a very practical example: analyzing a whole directory of gzip compressed Apache logfiles with the help of a ProcessPoolExecutor. For more about threads, the entire Chapter 12 of Beazley and Jones is great, with special mention to “Recipe 12.10. Defining an Actor Task,” which demonstrates the Actor model: a proven way of coordinating threads through message passing.

Brett Slatkin’s Effective Python (Addison-Wesley) has a multitopic chapter about concurrency, including coverage of coroutines, concurrent.futures with threads and processes, and the use of locks and queues for thread programming without the ThreadPoolExecutor.

High Performance Python (O’Reilly) by Micha Gorelick and Ian Ozsvald and The Python Standard Library by Example (Addison-Wesley), by Doug Hellmann, also cover threads and processes.

For a modern take on concurrency without threads or callbacks, Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks, by Paul Butcher (Pragmatic Bookshelf) is an excellent read. I love its subtitle: “When Threads Unravel.” In that book, threads and locks are covered in Chapter 1, and the remaining six chapters are devoted to modern alternatives to concurrent programming, as supported by different languages. Python, Ruby, and JavaScript are not among them.

If you are intrigued about the GIL, start with the Python Library and Extension FAQ (“Can’t we get rid of the Global Interpreter Lock?”). Also worth reading are posts by Guido van Rossum and Jesse Noller (contributor of the multiprocessing package): “It isn’t Easy to Remove the GIL” and “Python Threads and the Global Interpreter Lock.” Finally, David Beazley has a detailed exploration on the inner workings of the GIL: “Understanding the Python GIL.”⁸ In slide #54 of the presentation, Beazley reports some alarming results, including a 20× increase in processing time for a particular benchmark with the new GIL algorithm introduced in Python 3.2. However, Beazley apparently used an empty while True: pass to simulate CPU-bound work, and that is not realistic. The issue is not significant with real workloads, according to a comment by Antoine Pitrou—who implemented the new GIL algorithm—in the bug report submitted by Beazley.

While the GIL is a real problem and is not likely to go away soon, Jesse Noller and Richard Oudkerk contributed a library to make it easier to work around it in CPU-bound applications: the multiprocessing package, which emulates the threading API across processes, along with supporting infrastructure of locks, queues, pipes, shared memory, etc. The package was introduced in PEP 371 — Addition of the multiprocessing package to the standard library. The official documentation for the package is a 93 KB .rst file—that’s about 63 pages—making it one of the longest chapters in the Python standard library. Multiprocessing is the basis for the concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor.

For CPU- and data-intensive parallel processing, a new option with a lot of momentum in the big data community is the Apache Spark distributed computing engine, offering a friendly Python API and support for Python objects as data, as shown in their examples page.

Two elegant and super easy libraries for parallelizing tasks over processes are lelo by João S. O. Bueno and python-parallelize by Nat Pryce. The lelo package defines a @parallel decorator that you can apply to any function to magically make it unblocking: when you call the decorated function, its execution is started in another process. Nat Pryce’s python-parallelize package provides a parallelize generator that you can use to distribute the execution of a for loop over multiple CPUs. Both packages use the multiprocessing module under the covers.

Soapbox

Thread Avoidance

Concurrency: one of the most difficult topics in computer science (usually best avoided).⁹

David Beazley, Python coach and mad scientist

I agree with the apparently contradictory quotes by David Beazley, above, and Michele Simionato at the start of this chapter. After attending a concurrency course at the university—in which “concurrent programming” was equated to managing threads and locks—I came to the conclusion that I don’t want to manage threads and locks myself, any more than I want to manage memory allocation and deallocation. Those jobs are best carried out by the systems programmers who have the know-how, the inclination, and the time to get them right—hopefully.

That’s why I think the concurrent.futures package is exciting: it treats threads, processes, and queues as infrastructure at your service, not something you have to deal with directly. Of course, it’s designed with simple jobs in mind, the so-called “embarrassingly parallel” problems. But that’s a large slice of the concurrency problems we face when writing applications—as opposed to operating systems or database servers, as Simionato points out in that quote.

For “nonembarrassing” concurrency problems, threads and locks are not the answer either. Threads will never disappear at the OS level, but every programming language I’ve found exciting in the last several years provides better, higher-level, concurrency abstractions, as the Seven Concurrency Models book demonstrates. Go, Elixir, and Clojure are among them. Erlang—the implementation language of Elixir—is a prime example of a language designed from the ground up with concurrency in mind. It doesn’t excite me for a simple reason: I find its syntax ugly. Python spoiled me that way.

José Valim, well-known as a Ruby on Rails core contributor, designed Elixir with a pleasant, modern syntax. Like Lisp and Clojure, Elixir implements syntactic macros. That’s a double-edged sword. Syntactic macros enable powerful DSLs, but the proliferation of sublanguages can lead to incompatible codebases and community fragmentation. Lisp drowned in a flood of macros, with each Lisp shop using its own arcane dialect. Standardizing around Common Lisp resulted in a bloated language. I hope José Valim can inspire the Elixir community to avoid a similar outcome.

Like Elixir, Go is a modern language with fresh ideas. But, in some regards, it’s a conservative language, compared to Elixir. Go doesn’t have macros, and its syntax is simpler than Python’s. Go doesn’t support inheritance or operator overloading, and it offers fewer opportunities for metaprogramming than Python. These limitations are considered features. They lead to more predictable behavior and performance. That’s a big plus in the highly concurrent, mission-critical settings where Go aims to replace C++, Java, and Python.

While Elixir and Go are direct competitors in the high-concurrency space, their design philosophies appeal to different crowds. Both are likely to thrive. But in the history of programming languages, the conservative ones tend to attract more coders. I’d like to become fluent in Go and Elixir.

About the GIL

The GIL simplifies the implementation of the CPython interpreter and of extensions written in C, so we can thank the GIL for the vast number of extensions in C available for Python—and that is certainly one of the key reasons why Python is so popular today.

For many years, I was under the impression that the GIL made Python threads nearly useless beyond toy applications. It was not until I discovered that every blocking I/O call in the standard library releases the GIL that I realized Python threads are excellent for I/O-bound systems—the kind of applications customers usually pay me to develop, given my professional experience.

Concurrency in the Competition

MRI—the reference implementation of Ruby—also has a GIL, so its threads are under the same limitations as Python’s. Meanwhile, JavaScript interpreters don’t support user-level threads at all; asynchronous programming with callbacks is their only path to concurrency. I mention this because Ruby and JavaScript are the closest direct competitors to Python as general-purpose, dynamic programming languages.

Looking at the concurrency-savvy new crop of languages, Go and Elixir are probably the ones best positioned to eat Python’s lunch. But now we have asyncio. If hordes of people believe Node.js with raw callbacks is a viable platform for concurrent programming, how hard can it be to win them over to Python when the asyncio ecosystem matures? But that’s a topic for the next “Soapbox”.

¹ From Michele Simionato’s post Threads, processes and concurrency in Python: some thoughts, subtitled “Removing the hype around the multicore (non) revolution and some (hopefully) sensible comment about threads and other forms of concurrency.”

² The images are originally from the CIA World Factbook, a public-domain, U.S. government publication. I copied them to my site to avoid the risk of launching a DOS attack on CIA.gov.

³ This is a limitation of the CPython interpreter, not of the Python language itself. Jython and IronPython are not limited in this way; but Pypy, the fastest Python interpreter available, also has a GIL.

⁴ Slide 106 of “Generators: The Final Frontier”.

⁵ Your mileage may vary: with threads, you never know the exact sequencing of events that should happen practically at the same time; it’s possible that, in another machine, you see loiter(1) starting before loiter(0) finishes, particularly because sleep always releases the GIL so Python may switch to another thread even if you sleep for 0s.

⁶ Before configuring Cloudflare, I got HTTP 503 errors—Service Temporarily Unavailable—when testing the scripts with a few dozen concurrent requests on my inexpensive shared host account. Now those errors are gone.

⁷ The threading module has been available since Python 1.5.1 (1998), yet some insist on using the old thread module. In Python 3, it was renamed to _thread to highlight the fact that it’s just a low-level implementation detail, and shouldn’t be used in application code.

⁸ Thanks to Lucas Brunialti for sending me a link to this talk.

⁹ Slide #9 from “A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency,” tutorial presented at PyCon 2009.

Chapter 18. Concurrency with asyncio

Concurrency is about dealing with lots of things at once.

Parallelism is about doing lots of things at once.

Not the same, but related.

One is about structure, one is about execution.

Concurrency provides a way to structure a solution to solve a problem that may (but not necessarily) be parallelizable.¹

Rob Pike, Co-inventor of the Go language

Professor Imre Simon² liked to say there are two major sins in science: using different words to mean the same thing and using one word to mean different things. If you do any research on concurrent or parallel programming you will find different definitions for “concurrency” and “parallelism.” I will adopt the informal definitions by Rob Pike, quoted above.

For real parallelism, you must have multiple cores. A modern laptop has four CPU cores but is routinely running more than 100 processes at any given time under normal, casual use. So, in practice, most processing happens concurrently and not in parallel. The computer is constantly dealing with 100+ processes, making sure each has an opportunity to make progress, even if the CPU itself can’t do more than four things at once. Ten years ago we used machines that were also able to handle 100 processes concurrently, but on a single core. That’s why Rob Pike titled that talk “Concurrency Is Not Parallelism (It’s Better).”

This chapter introduces asyncio, a package that implements concurrency with coroutines driven by an event loop. It’s one of the largest and most ambitious libraries ever added to Python. Guido van Rossum developed asyncio outside of the Python repository and gave the project a code name of “Tulip”—so you’ll see references to that flower when researching this topic online. For example, the main discussion group is still called python-tulip.

Tulip was renamed to asyncio when it was added to the standard library in Python 3.4. It’s also compatible with Python 3.3—you can find it on PyPI under the new official name. Because it uses yield from expressions extensively, asyncio is incompatible with older versions of Python.

Tip

The Trollius project—also named after a flower—is a backport of asyncio to Python 2.6 and newer, replacing yield from with yield and clever callables named From and Return. A yield from … expression becomes yield From(…); and when a coroutine needs to return a result, you write raise Return(result) instead of return result. Trollius is led by Victor Stinner, who is also an asyncio core developer, and who kindly agreed to review this chapter as this book was going into production.

In this chapter we’ll see:

A comparison between a simple threaded program and the asyncio equivalent, showing the relationship between threads and asynchronous tasks

How the asyncio.Future class differs from concurrent.futures.Future

Asynchronous versions of the flag download examples from Chapter 17

How asynchronous programming manages high concurrency in network applications, without using threads or processes

How coroutines are a major improvement over callbacks for asynchronous programming

How to avoid blocking the event loop by offloading blocking operations to a thread pool

Writing asyncio servers, and how to rethink web applications for high concurrency

Why asyncio is poised to have a big impact in the Python ecosystem

Let’s get started with the simple example contrasting threading and asyncio.

Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison

During a discussion about threads and the GIL, Michele Simionato posted a simple but fun example using multiprocessing to display an animated spinner made with the ASCII characters "|/-\" on the console while some long computation is running.

I adapted Simionato’s example to use a thread with the Threading module and then a coroutine with asyncio, so you can see the two examples side by side and understand how to code concurrent behavior without threads.

The output shown in Examples 18-1 and 18-2 is animated, so you really should run the scripts to see what happens. If you’re in the subway (or somewhere else without a WiFi connection), take a look at Figure 18-1 and imagine the \ bar before the word “thinking” is spinning.

Figure 18-1. The scripts spinner_thread.py and spinner_asyncio.py produce similar output: the repr of a spinner object and the text Answer: 42. In the screenshot, spinner_asyncio.py is still running, and the spinner message \ thinking! is shown; when the script ends, that line will be replaced by the Answer: 42.

Let’s review the spinner_thread.py script first (Example 18-1).

Example 18-1. spinner_thread.py: animating a text spinner with a thread

import threading
import itertools
import time
import sys

class Signal:
    go = True

def spin(msg, signal):
    write, flush = sys.stdout.write, sys.stdout.flush
    for char in itertools.cycle('|/-\\'):
        status = char + ' ' + msg
        write(status)
        flush()
        write('\x08' * len(status))
        time.sleep(.1)
        if not signal.go:
            break
    write(' ' * len(status) + '\x08' * len(status))

def slow_function():
    # pretend waiting a long time for I/O
    time.sleep(3)
    return 42

def supervisor():
    signal = Signal()
    spinner = threading.Thread(target=spin,
                               args=('thinking!', signal))
    print('spinner object:', spinner)
    spinner.start()
    result = slow_function()
    signal.go = False
    spinner.join()
    return result

def main():
    result = supervisor()
    print('Answer:', result)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

This class defines a simple mutable object with a go attribute we’ll use to control the thread from outside.

This function will run in a separate thread. The signal argument is an instance of the Signal class just defined.

This is actually an infinite loop because itertools.cycle produces items cycling from the given sequence forever.

The trick to do text-mode animation: move the cursor back with backspace characters (\x08).

If the go attribute is no longer True, exit the loop.

Clear the status line by overwriting with spaces and moving the cursor back to the beginning.

Imagine this is some costly computation.

Calling sleep will block the main thread, but crucially, the GIL will be released so the secondary thread will proceed.

This function sets up the secondary thread, displays the thread object, runs the slow computation, and kills the thread.

Display the secondary thread object. The output looks like <Thread(Thread-1, initial)>.

Start the secondary thread.

Run slow_function; this blocks the main thread. Meanwhile, the spinner is animated by the secondary thread.

Change the state of the signal; this will terminate the for loop inside the spin function.

Wait until the spinner thread finishes.

Run the supervisor function.

Note that, by design, there is no API for terminating a thread in Python. You must send it a message to shut down. Here I used the signal.go attribute: when the main thread sets it to false, the spinner thread will eventually notice and exit cleanly.

Now let’s see how the same behavior can be achieved with an @asyncio.coroutine instead of a thread.

Note

As noted in the “Chapter Summary” (Chapter 16), asyncio uses a stricter definition of “coroutine.” A coroutine suitable for use with the asyncio API must use yield from and not yield in its body. Also, an asyncio coroutine should be driven by a caller invoking it through yield from or by passing the coroutine to one of the asyncio functions such as asyncio.async(…) and others covered in this chapter. Finally, the @asyncio.coroutine decorator should be applied to coroutines, as shown in the examples.

Take a look at Example 18-2.

Example 18-2. spinner_asyncio.py: animating a text spinner with a coroutine

import asyncio
import itertools
import sys

@asyncio.coroutine
def spin(msg):
    write, flush = sys.stdout.write, sys.stdout.flush
    for char in itertools.cycle('|/-\\'):
        status = char + ' ' + msg
        write(status)
        flush()
        write('\x08' * len(status))
        try:
            yield from asyncio.sleep(.1)
        except asyncio.CancelledError:
            break
    write(' ' * len(status) + '\x08' * len(status))

@asyncio.coroutine
def slow_function():
    # pretend waiting a long time for I/O
    yield from asyncio.sleep(3)
    return 42

@asyncio.coroutine
def supervisor():
    spinner = asyncio.async(spin('thinking!'))
    print('spinner object:', spinner)
    result = yield from slow_function()
    spinner.cancel()
    return result

def main():
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    result = loop.run_until_complete(supervisor())
    loop.close()
    print('Answer:', result)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Coroutines intended for use with asyncio should be decorated with @asyncio.coroutine. This not mandatory, but is highly advisable. See explanation following this listing.

Here we don’t need the signal argument that was used to shut down the thread in the spin function of Example 18-1.

Use yield from asyncio.sleep(.1) instead of just time.sleep(.1), to sleep without blocking the event loop.

If asyncio.CancelledError is raised after spin wakes up, it’s because cancellation was requested, so exit the loop.

slow_function is now a coroutine, and uses yield from to let the event loop proceed while this coroutine pretends to do I/O by sleeping.

The yield from asyncio.sleep(3) expression handles the control flow to the main loop, which will resume this coroutine after the sleep delay.

supervisor is now a coroutine as well, so it can drive slow_function with yield from.

asyncio.async(…) schedules the spin coroutine to run, wrapping it in a Task object, which is returned immediately.

Display the Task object. The output looks like <Task pending coro=<spin() running at spinner_asyncio.py:12>>.

Drive the slow_function(). When that is done, get the returned value. Meanwhile, the event loop will continue running because slow_function ultimately uses yield from asyncio.sleep(3) to hand control back to the main loop.

A Task object can be cancelled; this raises asyncio.CancelledError at the yield line where the coroutine is currently suspended. The coroutine may catch the exception and delay or even refuse to cancel.

Get a reference to the event loop.

Drive the supervisor coroutine to completion; the return value of the coroutine is the return value of this call.

Warning

Never use time.sleep(…) in asyncio coroutines unless you want to block the main thread, therefore freezing the event loop and probably the whole application as well. If a coroutine needs to spend some time doing nothing, it should yield from asyncio.sleep(DELAY).

The use of the @asyncio.coroutine decorator is not mandatory, but highly recommended: it makes the coroutines stand out among regular functions, and helps with debugging by issuing a warning when a coroutine is garbage collected without being yielded from—which means some operation was left unfinished and is likely a bug. This is not a priming decorator.

Note that the line count of spinner_thread.py and spinner_asyncio.py is nearly the same. The supervisor functions are the heart of these examples. Let’s compare them in detail. Example 18-3 lists only the supervisor from the Threading example.

Example 18-3. spinner_thread.py: the threaded supervisor function

def supervisor():
    signal = Signal()
    spinner = threading.Thread(target=spin,
                               args=('thinking!', signal))
    print('spinner object:', spinner)
    spinner.start()
    result = slow_function()
    signal.go = False
    spinner.join()
    return result

For comparison, Example 18-4 shows the supervisor coroutine.

Example 18-4. spinner_asyncio.py: the asynchronous supervisor coroutine

@asyncio.coroutine
def supervisor():
    spinner = asyncio.async(spin('thinking!'))
    print('spinner object:', spinner)
    result = yield from slow_function()
    spinner.cancel()
    return result

Here is a summary of the main differences to note between the two supervisor implementations:

An asyncio.Task is roughly the equivalent of a threading.Thread. Victor Stinner, special technical reviewer for this chapter, points out that “a Task is like a green thread in libraries that implement cooperative multitasking, such as gevent.”

A Task drives a coroutine, and a Thread invokes a callable.

You don’t instantiate Task objects yourself, you get them by passing a coroutine to asyncio.async(…) or loop.create_task(…).

When you get a Task object, it is already scheduled to run (e.g., by asyncio.async); a Thread instance must be explicitly told to run by calling its start method.

In the threaded supervisor, the slow_function is a plain function and is directly invoked by the thread. In the asyncio supervisor, slow_function is a coroutine driven by yield from.

There’s no API to terminate a thread from the outside, because a thread could be interrupted at any point, leaving the system in an invalid state. For tasks, there is the Task.cancel() instance method, which raises CancelledError inside the coroutine. The coroutine can deal with this by catching the exception in the yield where it’s suspended.

The supervisor coroutine must be executed with loop.run_until_complete in the main function.

This comparison should help you understand how concurrent jobs are orchestrated with asyncio, in contrast to how it’s done with the more familiar Threading module.

One final point related to threads versus coroutines: if you’ve done any nontrivial programming with threads, you know how challenging it is to reason about the program because the scheduler can interrupt a thread at any time. You must remember to hold locks to protect the critical sections of your program, to avoid getting interrupted in the middle of a multistep operation—which could leave data in an invalid state.

With coroutines, everything is protected against interruption by default. You must explicitly yield to let the rest of the program run. Instead of holding locks to synchronize the operations of multiple threads, you have coroutines that are “synchronized” by definition: only one of them is running at any time. And when you want to give up control, you use yield or yield from to give control back to the scheduler. That’s why it is possible to safely cancel a coroutine: by definition, a coroutine can only be cancelled when it’s suspended at a yield point, so you can perform cleanup by handling the CancelledError exception.

We’ll now see how the asyncio.Future class differs from the concurrent.futures.Future class we saw in Chapter 17.

asyncio.Future: Nonblocking by Design

The asyncio.Future and the concurrent.futures.Future classes have mostly the same interface, but are implemented differently and are not interchangeable. PEP-3156 — Asynchronous IO Support Rebooted: the “asyncio” Module has this to say about this unfortunate situation:

In the future (pun intended) we may unify asyncio.Future and concurrent.futures.Future (e.g., by adding an __iter__ method to the latter that works with yield from).

As mentioned in “Where Are the Futures?”, futures are created only as the result of scheduling something for execution. In asyncio, BaseEventLoop.create_task(…) takes a coroutine, schedules it to run, and returns an asyncio.Task instance—which is also an instance of asyncio.Future because Task is a subclass of Future designed to wrap a coroutine. This is analogous to how we create concurrent.futures.Future instances by invoking Executor.submit(…).

Like its concurrent.futures.Future counterpart, the asyncio.Future class provides .done(), .add_done_callback(…), and .result() methods, among others. The first two methods work as described in “Where Are the Futures?”, but .result() is very different.

In asyncio.Future, the .result() method takes no arguments, so you can’t specify a timeout. Also, if you call .result() and the future is not done, it does not block waiting for the result. Instead, an asyncio.InvalidStateError is raised.

However, the usual way to get the result of an asyncio.Future is to yield from it, as we’ll see in Example 18-8.

Using yield from with a future automatically takes care of waiting for it to finish, without blocking the event loop—because in asyncio, yield from is used to give control back to the event loop.

Note that using yield from with a future is the coroutine equivalent of the functionality offered by add_done_callback: instead of triggering a callback, when the delayed operation is done, the event loop sets the result of the future, and the yield from expression produces a return value inside our suspended coroutine, allowing it to resume.

In summary, because asyncio.Future is designed to work with yield from, these methods are often not needed:

You don’t need my_future.add_done_callback(…) because you can simply put whatever processing you would do after the future is done in the lines that follow yield from my_future in your coroutine. That’s the big advantage of having coroutines: functions that can be suspended and resumed.

You don’t need my_future.result() because the value of a yield from expression on a future is the result (e.g., result = yield from my_future).

Of course, there are situations in which .done(), .add_done_callback(…), and .result() are useful. But in normal usage, asyncio futures are driven by yield from, not by calling those methods.

We’ll now consider how yield from and the asyncio API brings together futures, tasks, and coroutines.

Yielding from Futures, Tasks, and Coroutines

In asyncio, there is a close relationship between futures and coroutines because you can get the result of an asyncio.Future by yielding from it. This means that res = yield from foo() works if foo is a coroutine function (therefore it returns a coroutine object when called) or if foo is a plain function that returns a Future or Task instance. This is one of the reasons why coroutines and futures are interchangeable in many parts of the asyncio API.

In order to execute, a coroutine must be scheduled, and then it’s wrapped in an asyncio.Task. Given a coroutine, there are two main ways of obtaining a Task:

asyncio.async(coro_or_future, *, loop=None)

This function unifies coroutines and futures: the first argument can be either one. If it’s a Future or Task, it’s returned unchanged. If it’s a coroutine, async calls loop.create_task(…) on it to create a Task. An optional event loop may be passed as the loop= keyword argument; if omitted, async gets the loop object by calling asyncio.get_event_loop().

BaseEventLoop.create_task(coro)

This method schedules the coroutine for execution and returns an asyncio.Task object. If called on a custom subclass of BaseEventLoop, the object returned may be an instance of some other Task-compatible class provided by an external library (e.g., Tornado).

Warning

BaseEventLoop.create_task(…) is only available in Python 3.4.2 or later. If you’re using an older version of Python 3.3 or 3.4, you need to use asyncio.async(…), or install a more recent version of asyncio from PyPI.

Several asyncio functions accept coroutines and wrap them in asyncio.Task objects automatically, using asyncio.async internally. One example is BaseEventLoop.run_until_complete(…).

If you want to experiment with futures and coroutines on the Python console or in small tests, you can use the following snippet:³

>>> import asyncio
>>> def run_sync(coro_or_future):
...     loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
...     return loop.run_until_complete(coro_or_future)
...
>>> a = run_sync(some_coroutine())

The relationship between coroutines, futures, and tasks is documented in section 18.5.3. Tasks and coroutines of the asyncio documentation, where you’ll find this note:

In this documentation, some methods are documented as coroutines, even if they are plain Python functions returning a Future. This is intentional to have a freedom of tweaking the implementation of these functions in the future.

Having covered these fundamentals, we’ll now study the code for the asynchronous flag download script flags_asyncio.py demonstrated along with the sequential and thread pool scripts in Example 17-1 (Chapter 17).

Downloading with asyncio and aiohttp

As of Python 3.4, asyncio only supports TCP and UDP directly. For HTTP or any other protocol, we need third-party packages; aiohttp is the one everyone seems to be using for asyncio HTTP clients and servers at this time.

Example 18-5 is the full listing for the flag downloading script flags_asyncio.py. Here is a high-level view of how it works:

We start the process in download_many by feeding the event loop with several coroutine objects produced by calling download_one.

The asyncio event loop activates each coroutine in turn.

When a client coroutine such as get_flag uses yield from to delegate to a library coroutine—such as aiohttp.request—control goes back to the event loop, which can execute another previously scheduled coroutine.

The event loop uses low-level APIs based on callbacks to get notified when a blocking operation is completed.

When that happens, the main loop sends a result to the suspended coroutine.

The coroutine then advances to the next yield, for example, yield from resp.read() in get_flag. The event loop takes charge again. Steps 4, 5, and 6 repeat until the event loop is terminated.

This is similar to the example we looked at in “The Taxi Fleet Simulation”, where a main loop started several taxi processes in turn. As each taxi process yielded, the main loop scheduled the next event for that taxi (to happen in the future), and proceeded to activate the next taxi in the queue. The taxi simulation is much simpler, and you can easily understand its main loop. But the general flow is the same as in asyncio: a single-threaded program where a main loop activates queued coroutines one by one. Each coroutine advances a few steps, then yields control back to the main loop, which then activates the next coroutine in the queue.

Now let’s review Example 18-5 play by play.

Example 18-5. flags_asyncio.py: asynchronous download script with asyncio and aiohttp

import asyncio

import aiohttp

from flags import BASE_URL, save_flag, show, main

@asyncio.coroutine
def get_flag(cc):
    url = '{}/{cc}/{cc}.gif'.format(BASE_URL, cc=cc.lower())
    resp = yield from aiohttp.request('GET', url)
    image = yield from resp.read()
    return image

@asyncio.coroutine
def download_one(cc):
    image = yield from get_flag(cc)
    show(cc)
    save_flag(image, cc.lower() + '.gif')
    return cc

def download_many(cc_list):
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    to_do = [download_one(cc) for cc in sorted(cc_list)]
    wait_coro = asyncio.wait(to_do)
    res, _ = loop.run_until_complete(wait_coro)
    loop.close()

    return len(res)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main(download_many)

aiohttp must be installed—it’s not in the standard library.

Reuse some functions from the flags module (Example 17-2).

Coroutines should be decorated with @asyncio.coroutine.

Blocking operations are implemented as coroutines, and your code delegates to them via yield from so they run asynchronously.

Reading the response contents is a separate asynchronous operation.

download_one must also be a coroutine, because it uses yield from.

The only difference from the sequential implementation of download_one are the words yield from in this line; the rest of the function body is exactly as before.

Get a reference to the underlying event-loop implementation.

Build a list of generator objects by calling the download_one function once for each flag to be retrieved.

Despite its name, wait is not a blocking function. It’s a coroutine that completes when all the coroutines passed to it are done (that’s the default behavior of wait; see explanation after this example).

Execute the event loop until wait_coro is done; this is where the script will block while the event loop runs. We ignore the second item returned by run_until_complete. The reason is explained next.

Shut down the event loop.

Note

It would be nice if event loop instances were context managers, so we could use a with block to make sure the loop is closed. However, the situation is complicated by the fact that client code never creates the event loop directly, but gets a reference to it by calling asyncio.get_event_loop(). Sometimes our code does not “own” the event loop, so it would be wrong to close it. For example, when using an external GUI event loop with a package like Quamash, the Qt library is responsible for shutting down the loop when the application quits.

The asyncio.wait(…) coroutine accepts an iterable of futures or coroutines; wait wraps each coroutine in a Task. The end result is that all objects managed by wait become instances of Future, one way or another. Because it is a coroutine function, calling wait(…) returns a coroutine/generator object; this is what the wait_coro variable holds. To drive the coroutine, we pass it to loop.run_until_complete(…).

The loop.run_until_complete function accepts a future or a coroutine. If it gets a coroutine, run_until_complete wraps it into a Task, similar to what wait does. Coroutines, futures, and tasks can all be driven by yield from, and this is what run_until_complete does with the wait_coro object returned by the wait call. When wait_coro runs to completion, it returns a 2-tuple where the first item is the set of completed futures, and the second is the set of those not completed. In Example 18-5, the second set will always be empty—that’s why we explicitly ignore it by assigning to _. But wait accepts two keyword-only arguments that may cause it to return even if some of the futures are not complete: timeout and return_when. See the asyncio.wait documentation for details.

Note that in Example 18-5 I could not reuse the get_flag function from flags.py (Example 17-2) because that uses the requests library, which performs blocking I/O. To leverage asyncio, we must replace every function that hits the network with an asynchronous version that is invoked with yield from, so that control is given back to the event loop. Using yield from in get_flag means that it must be driven as a coroutine.

That’s why I could not reuse the download_one function from flags_threadpool.py (Example 17-3) either. The code in Example 18-5 drives get_flag with yield_from, so download_one is itself also a coroutine. For each request, a download_one coroutine object is created in download_many, and they are all driven by the loop.run_until_complete function, after being wrapped by the asyncio.wait coroutine.

There are a lot of new concepts to grasp in asyncio but the overall logic of Example 18-5 is easy to follow if you employ a trick suggested by Guido van Rossum himself: squint and pretend the yield from keywords are not there. If you do that, you’ll notice that the code is as easy to read as plain old sequential code.

For example, imagine that the body of this coroutine…

@asyncio.coroutine
def get_flag(cc):
    url = '{}/{cc}/{cc}.gif'.format(BASE_URL, cc=cc.lower())
    resp = yield from aiohttp.request('GET', url)
    image = yield from resp.read()
    return image

…works like the following function, except that it never blocks:

def get_flag(cc):
    url = '{}/{cc}/{cc}.gif'.format(BASE_URL, cc=cc.lower())
    resp = aiohttp.request('GET', url)
    image = resp.read()
    return image

Using the yield from foo syntax avoids blocking because the current coroutine is suspended (i.e., the delegating generator where the yield from code is), but the control flow goes back to the event loop, which can drive other coroutines. When the foo future or coroutine is done, it returns a result to the suspended coroutine, resuming it.

At the end of the section “Using yield from”, I stated two facts about every usage of yield from. Here they are, summarized:

Every arrangement of coroutines chained with yield from must be ultimately driven by a caller that is not a coroutine, which invokes next(…) or .send(…) on the outermost delegating generator, explicitly or implicitly (e.g., in a for loop).

The innermost subgenerator in the chain must be a simple generator that uses just yield—or an iterable object.

When using yield from with the asyncio API, both facts remain true, with the following specifics:

The coroutine chains we write are always driven by passing our outermost delegating generator to an asyncio API call, such as loop.run_until_complete(…).

In other words, when using asyncio our code doesn’t drive a coroutine chain by calling next(…) or .send(…) on it—the asyncio event loop does that.

The coroutine chains we write always end by delegating with yield from to some asyncio coroutine function or coroutine method (e.g., yield from asyncio.sleep(…) in Example 18-2) or coroutines from libraries that implement higher-level protocols (e.g., resp = yield from aiohttp.request('GET', url) in the get_flag coroutine of Example 18-5).

In other words, the innermost subgenerator will be a library function that does the actual I/O, not something we write.

To summarize: as we use asyncio, our asynchronous code consists of coroutines that are delegating generators driven by asyncio itself and that ultimately delegate to asyncio library coroutines—possibly by way of some third-party library such as aiohttp. This arrangement creates pipelines where the asyncio event loop drives—through our coroutines—the library functions that perform the low-level asynchronous I/O.

We are now ready to answer one question raised in Chapter 17:

How can flags_asyncio.py perform 5× faster than flags.py when both are single threaded?

Running Circles Around Blocking Calls

Ryan Dahl, the inventor of Node.js, introduces the philosophy of his project by saying “We’re doing I/O completely wrong.⁴" He defines a blocking function as one that does disk or network I/O, and argues that we can’t treat them as we treat nonblocking functions. To explain why, he presents the numbers in the first two columns of Table 18-1.

Table 18-1. Modern computer latency for reading data from different devices; third column shows proportional times in a scale easier to understand for us slow humans

Device
CPU cycles
Proportional “human” scale

L1 cache

3

3 seconds

L2 cache

14

14 seconds

RAM

250

250 seconds

disk

41,000,000

1.3 years

network

240,000,000

7.6 years

To make sense of Table 18-1, bear in mind that modern CPUs with GHz clocks run billions of cycles per second. Let’s say that a CPU runs exactly 1 billion cycles per second. That CPU can make 333,333,333 L1 cache reads in one second, or 4 (four!) network reads in the same time. The third column of Table 18-1 puts those numbers in perspective by multiplying the second column by a constant factor. So, in an alternate universe, if one read from L1 cache took 3 seconds, then a network read would take 7.6 years!

There are two ways to prevent blocking calls to halt the progress of the entire application:

Run each blocking operation in a separate thread.

Turn every blocking operation into a nonblocking asynchronous call.

Threads work fine, but the memory overhead for each OS thread—the kind that Python uses—is on the order of megabytes, depending on the OS. We can’t afford one thread per connection if we are handling thousands of connections.

Callbacks are the traditional way to implement asynchronous calls with low memory overhead. They are a low-level concept, similar to the oldest and most primitive concurrency mechanism of all: hardware interrupts. Instead of waiting for a response, we register a function to be called when something happens. In this way, every call we make can be nonblocking. Ryan Dahl advocates callbacks for their simplicity and low overhead.

Of course, we can only make callbacks work because the event loop underlying our asynchronous applications can rely on infrastructure that uses interrupts, threads, polling, background processes, etc. to ensure that multiple concurrent requests make progress and they eventually get done.⁵ When the event loop gets a response, it calls back our code. But the single main thread shared by the event loop and our application code is never blocked—if we don’t make mistakes.

When used as coroutines, generators provide an alternative way to do asynchronous programming. From the perspective of the event loop, invoking a callback or calling .send() on a suspended coroutine is pretty much the same. There is a memory overhead for each suspended coroutine, but it’s orders of magnitude smaller than the overhead for each thread. And they avoid the dreaded “callback hell,” which we’ll discuss in “From Callbacks to Futures and Coroutines”.

Now the five-fold performance advantage of flags_asyncio.py over flags.py should make sense: flags.py spends billions of CPU cycles waiting for each download, one after the other. The CPU is actually doing a lot meanwhile, just not running your program. In contrast, when loop_until_complete is called in the download_many function of flags_asyncio.py, the event loop drives each download_one coroutine to the first yield from, and this in turn drives each get_flag coroutine to the first yield from, calling aiohttp.request(…). None of these calls are blocking, so all requests are started in a fraction of a second.

As the asyncio infrastructure gets the first response back, the event loop sends it to the waiting get_flag coroutine. As get_flag gets a response, it advances to the next yield from, which calls resp.read() and yields control back to the main loop. Other responses arrive in close succession (because they were made almost at the same time). As each get_flag returns, the delegating generator download_one resumes and saves the image file.

Note

For maximum performance, the save_flag operation should be asynchronous, but asyncio does not provide an asynchronous filesystem API at this time—as Node does. If that becomes a bottleneck in your application, you can use the loop.run_in_executor function to run save_flag in a thread pool. Example 18-9 will show how.

Because the asynchronous operations are interleaved, the total time needed to download many images concurrently is much less than doing it sequentially. When making 600 HTTP requests with asyncio I got all results back more than 70 times faster than with a sequential script.

Now let’s go back to the HTTP client example to see how we can display an animated progress bar and perform proper error handling.

Enhancing the asyncio downloader Script

Recall from “Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling” that the flags2 set of examples share the same command-line interface. This includes the flags2_asyncio.py we will analyze in this section. For instance, Example 18-6 shows how to get 100 flags (-al 100) from the ERROR server, using 100 concurrent requests (-m 100).

Example 18-6. Running flags2_asyncio.py

$ python3 flags2_asyncio.py -s ERROR -al 100 -m 100
ERROR site: http://localhost:8003/flags
Searching for 100 flags: from AD to LK
100 concurrent connections will be used.
--------------------
73 flags downloaded.
27 errors.
Elapsed time: 0.64s

Act Responsibly When Testing Concurrent Clients

Even if the overall download time is not different between the threaded and asyncio HTTP clients, asyncio can send requests faster, so it’s even more likely that the server will suspect a DOS attack. To really exercise these concurrent clients at full speed, set up a local HTTP server for testing, as explained in the README.rst inside the 17-futures/countries/ directory of the Fluent Python code repository.

Now let’s see how flags2_asyncio.py is implemented.

Using asyncio.as_completed

In Example 18-5, I passed a list of coroutines to asyncio.wait, which—when driven by loop.run_until_complete—would return the results of the downloads when all were done. But to update a progress bar we need to get results as they are done. Fortunately, there is an asyncio equivalent of the as_completed generator function we used in the thread pool example with the progress bar (Example 17-14).

Writing a flags2 example to leverage asyncio entails rewriting several functions that the concurrent.future version could reuse. That’s because there’s only one main thread in an asyncio program and we can’t afford to have blocking calls in that thread, as it’s the same thread that runs the event loop. So I had to rewrite get_flag to use yield from for all network access. Now get_flag is a coroutine, so download_one must drive it with yield from, therefore download_one itself becomes a coroutine. Previously, in Example 18-5, download_one was driven by download_many: the calls to download_one were wrapped in an asyncio.wait call and passed to loop.run_until_complete. Now we need finer control for progress reporting and error handling, so I moved most of the logic from download_many into a new downloader_coro coroutine, and use download_many just to set up the event loop and schedule downloader_coro.

Example 18-7 shows the top of the flags2_asyncio.py script where the get_flag and download_one coroutines are defined. Example 18-8 lists the rest of the source, with downloader_coro and download_many.

Example 18-7. flags2_asyncio.py: Top portion of the script; remaining code is in Example 18-8

import asyncio
import collections

import aiohttp
from aiohttp import web
import tqdm

from flags2_common import main, HTTPStatus, Result, save_flag

# default set low to avoid errors from remote site, such as
# 503 - Service Temporarily Unavailable
DEFAULT_CONCUR_REQ = 5
MAX_CONCUR_REQ = 1000

class FetchError(Exception):
    def __init__(self, country_code):
        self.country_code = country_code

@asyncio.coroutine
def get_flag(base_url, cc):
    url = '{}/{cc}/{cc}.gif'.format(base_url, cc=cc.lower())
    resp = yield from aiohttp.request('GET', url)
    if resp.status == 200:
        image = yield from resp.read()
        return image
    elif resp.status == 404:
        raise web.HTTPNotFound()
    else:
        raise aiohttp.HttpProcessingError(
            code=resp.status, message=resp.reason,
            headers=resp.headers)

@asyncio.coroutine
def download_one(cc, base_url, semaphore, verbose):
    try:
        with (yield from semaphore):
            image = yield from get_flag(base_url, cc)
    except web.HTTPNotFound:
        status = HTTPStatus.not_found
        msg = 'not found'
    except Exception as exc:
        raise FetchError(cc) from exc
    else:
        save_flag(image, cc.lower() + '.gif')
        status = HTTPStatus.ok
        msg = 'OK'

    if verbose and msg:
        print(cc, msg)

    return Result(status, cc)

This custom exception will be used to wrap other HTTP or network exceptions and carry the country_code for error reporting.

get_flag will either return the bytes of the image downloaded, raise web.HTTPNotFound if the HTTP response status is 404, or raise an aiohttp.HttpProcessingError for other HTTP status codes.

The semaphore argument is an instance of asyncio.Semaphore, a synchronization device that limits the number of concurrent requests.

A semaphore is used as a context manager in a yield from expression so that the system as whole is not blocked: only this coroutine is blocked while the semaphore counter is at the maximum allowed number.

When this with statement exits, the semaphore counter is decremented, unblocking some other coroutine instance that may be waiting for the same semaphore object.

If the flag was not found, just set the status for the Result accordingly.

Any other exception will be reported as a FetchError with the country code and the original exception chained using the raise X from Y syntax introduced in PEP 3134 — Exception Chaining and Embedded Tracebacks.

This function call actually saves the flag image to disk.

In Example 18-7, you can see that the code for get_flag and download_one changed significantly from the sequential version because these functions are now coroutines using yield from to make asynchronous calls.

Network client code of the sort we are studying should always use some throttling mechanism to avoid pounding the server with too many concurrent requests—the overall performance of the system may degrade if the server is overloaded. In flags2_threadpool.py (Example 17-14), the throttling was done by instantiating the ThreadPoolExecutor with the required max_workers argument set to concur_req in the download_many function, so only concur_req threads are started in the pool. In flags2_asyncio.py, I used an asyncio.Semaphore, which is created by the downloader_coro function (shown next, in Example 18-8) and is passed as the semaphore argument to download_one in Example 18-7.⁶

A Semaphore is an object that holds an internal counter that is decremented whenever we call the .acquire() coroutine method on it, and incremented when we call the .release() coroutine method. The initial value of the counter is set when the Semaphore is instantiated, as in this line of downloader_coro:

    semaphore = asyncio.Semaphore(concur_req)

Calling .acquire() does not block when the counter is greater than zero, but if the counter is zero, .acquire() will block the calling coroutine until some other coroutine calls .release() on the same Semaphore, thus incrementing the counter. In Example 18-7, I don’t call .acquire() or .release(), but use the semaphore as a context manager in this block of code inside download_one:

        with (yield from semaphore):
            image = yield from get_flag(base_url, cc)

That snippet guarantees that no more than concur_req instances of get_flags coroutines will be started at any time.

Now let’s take a look at the rest of the script in Example 18-8. Note that most functionality of the old download_many function is now in a coroutine, downloader_coro. This was necessary because we must use yield from to retrieve the results of the futures yielded by asyncio.as_completed, therefore as_completed must be invoked in a coroutine. However, I couldn’t simply turn download_many into a coroutine, because I must pass it to the main function from flags2_common in the last line of the script, and that main function is not expecting a coroutine, just a plain function. Therefore I created downloader_coro to run the as_completed loop, and now download_many simply sets up the event loop and schedules downloader_coro by passing it to loop.run_until_complete.

Example 18-8. flags2_asyncio.py: Script continued from Example 18-7

@asyncio.coroutine
def downloader_coro(cc_list, base_url, verbose, concur_req):
    counter = collections.Counter()
    semaphore = asyncio.Semaphore(concur_req)
    to_do = [download_one(cc, base_url, semaphore, verbose)
             for cc in sorted(cc_list)]

    to_do_iter = asyncio.as_completed(to_do)
    if not verbose:
        to_do_iter = tqdm.tqdm(to_do_iter, total=len(cc_list))
    for future in to_do_iter:
        try:
            res = yield from future
        except FetchError as exc:
            country_code = exc.country_code
            try:
                error_msg = exc.__cause__.args[0]
            except IndexError:
                error_msg = exc.__cause__.__class__.__name__
            if verbose and error_msg:
                msg = '*** Error for {}: {}'
                print(msg.format(country_code, error_msg))
            status = HTTPStatus.error
        else:
            status = res.status

        counter[status] += 1

    return counter

def download_many(cc_list, base_url, verbose, concur_req):
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    coro = downloader_coro(cc_list, base_url, verbose, concur_req)
    counts = loop.run_until_complete(coro)
    loop.close()

    return counts

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main(download_many, DEFAULT_CONCUR_REQ, MAX_CONCUR_REQ)

The coroutine receives the same arguments as download_many, but it cannot be invoked directly from main precisely because it’s a coroutine function and not a plain function like download_many.

Create an asyncio.Semaphore that will allow up to concur_req active coroutines among those using this semaphore.

Create a list of coroutine objects, one per call to the download_one coroutine.

Get an iterator that will return futures as they are done.

Wrap the iterator in the tqdm function to display progress.

Iterate over the completed futures; this loop is very similar to the one in download_many in Example 17-14; most changes have to do with exception handling because of differences in the HTTP libraries (requests versus aiohttp).

The easiest way to retrieve the result of an asyncio.Future is using yield from instead of calling future.result().

Every exception in download_one is wrapped in a FetchError with the original exception chained.

Get the country code where the error occurred from the FetchError exception.

Try to retrieve the error message from the original exception (__cause__).

If the error message cannot be found in the original exception, use the name of the chained exception class as the error message.

Tally outcomes.

Return the counter, as done in the other scripts.

download_many simply instantiates the coroutine and passes it to the event loop with run_until_complete.

When all work is done, shut down the event loop and return counts.

In Example 18-8, we could not use the mapping of futures to country codes we saw in Example 17-14 because the futures returned by asyncio.as_completed are not necessarily the same futures we pass into the as_completed call. Internally, the asyncio machinery replaces the future objects we provide with others that will, in the end, produce the same results.⁷

Because I could not use the futures as keys to retrieve the country code from a dict in case of failure, I implemented the custom FetchError exception (shown in Example 18-7). FetchError wraps a network exception and holds the country code associated with it, so the country code can be reported with the error in verbose mode. If there is no error, the country code is available as the result of the yield from future expression at the top of the for loop.

This wraps up the discussion of an asyncio example functionally equivalent to the flags2_threadpool.py we saw earlier. Next, we’ll implement enhancements to flags2_asyncio.py that will let us explore asyncio further.

While discussing Example 18-7, I noted that save_flag performs disk I/O and should be executed asynchronously. The following section shows how.

Using an Executor to Avoid Blocking the Event Loop

In the Python community, we tend to overlook the fact that local filesystem access is blocking, rationalizing that it doesn’t suffer from the higher latency of network access (which is also dangerously unpredictable). In contrast, Node.js programmers are constantly reminded that all filesystem functions are blocking because their signatures require a callback. Recall from Table 18-1 that blocking for disk I/O wastes millions of CPU cycles, and this may have a significant impact on the performance of the application.

In Example 18-7, the blocking function is save_flag. In the threaded version of the script (Example 17-14), save_flag blocks the thread that’s running the download_one function, but that’s only one of several worker threads. Behind the scenes, the blocking I/O call releases the GIL, so another thread can proceed. But in flags2_asyncio.py, save_flag blocks the single thread our code shares with the asyncio event loop, therefore the whole application freezes while the file is being saved. The solution to this problem is the run_in_executor method of the event loop object.

Behind the scenes, the asyncio event loop has a thread pool executor, and you can send callables to be executed by it with run_in_executor. To use this feature in our example, only a few lines need to change in the download_one coroutine, as shown in Example 18-9.

Example 18-9. flags2_asyncio_executor.py: Using the default thread pool executor to run save_flag

@asyncio.coroutine
def download_one(cc, base_url, semaphore, verbose):
    try:
        with (yield from semaphore):
            image = yield from get_flag(base_url, cc)
    except web.HTTPNotFound:
        status = HTTPStatus.not_found
        msg = 'not found'
    except Exception as exc:
        raise FetchError(cc) from exc
    else:
        loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
        loop.run_in_executor(None,
                save_flag, image, cc.lower() + '.gif')
        status = HTTPStatus.ok
        msg = 'OK'

    if verbose and msg:
        print(cc, msg)

    return Result(status, cc)

Get a reference to the event loop object.

The first argument to run_in_executor is an executor instance; if None, the default thread pool executor of the event loop is used.

The remaining arguments are the callable and its positional arguments.

Note

When I tested Example 18-9, there was no noticeable change in performance for using run_in_executor to save the image files because they are not large (13 KB each, on average). But you’ll see an effect if you edit the save_flag function in flags2_common.py to save 10 times as many bytes on each file—just by coding fp.write(img*10) instead of fp.write(img). With an average download size of 130 KB, the advantage of using run_in_executor becomes clear. If you’re downloading megapixel images, the speedup will be significant.

The advantage of coroutines over callbacks becomes evident when we need to coordinate asynchronous requests, and not just make completely independent requests. The next section explains the problem and the solution.

From Callbacks to Futures and Coroutines

Event-oriented programming with coroutines requires some effort to master, so it’s good to be clear on how it improves on the classic callback style. This is the theme of this section.

Anyone with some experience in callback-style event-oriented programming knows the term “callback hell”: the nesting of callbacks when one operation depends on the result of the previous operation. If you have three asynchronous calls that must happen in succession, you need to code callbacks nested three levels deep. Example 18-10 is an example in JavaScript.

Example 18-10. Callback hell in JavaScript: nested anonymous functions, a.k.a. Pyramid of Doom

api_call1(request1, function (response1) {
    // stage 1
    var request2 = step1(response1);

    api_call2(request2, function (response2) {
        // stage 2
        var request3 = step2(response2);

        api_call3(request3, function (response3) {
            // stage 3
            step3(response3);
        });
    });
});

In Example 18-10, api_call1, api_call2, and api_call3 are library functions your code uses to retrieve results asynchronously—perhaps api_call1 goes to a database and api_call2 gets data from a web service, for example. Each of these take a callback function, which in JavaScript are often anonymous functions (they are named stage1, stage2, and stage3 in the following Python example). The step1, step2, and step3 here represent regular functions of your application that process the responses received by the callbacks.

Example 18-11 shows what callback hell looks like in Python.

Example 18-11. Callback hell in Python: chained callbacks

def stage1(response1):
    request2 = step1(response1)
    api_call2(request2, stage2)

def stage2(response2):
    request3 = step2(response2)
    api_call3(request3, stage3)

def stage3(response3):
    step3(response3)

api_call1(request1, stage1)

Although the code in Example 18-11 is arranged very differently from Example 18-10, they do exactly the same thing, and the JavaScript example could be written using the same arrangement (but the Python code can’t be written in the JavaScript style because of the syntactic limitations of lambda).

Code organized as Example 18-10 or Example 18-11 is hard to read, but it’s even harder to write: each function does part of the job, sets up the next callback, and returns, to let the event loop proceed. At this point, all local context is lost. When the next callback (e.g., stage2) is executed, you don’t have the value of request2 any more. If you need it, you must rely on closures or external data structures to store it between the different stages of the processing.

That’s where coroutines really help. Within a coroutine, to perform three asynchronous actions in succession, you yield three times to let the event loop continue running. When a result is ready, the coroutine is activated with a .send() call. From the perspective of the event loop, that’s similar to invoking a callback. But for the users of a coroutine-style asynchronous API, the situation is vastly improved: the entire sequence of three operations is in one function body, like plain old sequential code with local variables to retain the context of the overall task under way. See Example 18-12.

Example 18-12. Coroutines and yield from enable asynchronous programming without callbacks

@asyncio.coroutine
def three_stages(request1):
    response1 = yield from api_call1(request1)
    # stage 1
    request2 = step1(response1)
    response2 = yield from api_call2(request2)
    # stage 2
    request3 = step2(response2)
    response3 = yield from api_call3(request3)
    # stage 3
    step3(response3)

loop.create_task(three_stages(request1))  # must explicitly schedule execution

Example 18-12 is much easier to follow the previous JavaScript and Python examples: the three stages of the operation appear one after the other inside the same function. This makes it trivial to use previous results in follow-up processing. It also provides a context for error reporting through exceptions.

Suppose in Example 18-11 the processing of the call api_call2(request2, stage2) raises an I/O exception (that’s the last line of the stage1 function). The exception cannot be caught in stage1 because api_call2 is an asynchronous call: it returns immediately, before any I/O is performed. In callback-based APIs, this is solved by registering two callbacks for each asynchronous call: one for handling the result of successful operations, another for handling errors. Work conditions in callback hell quickly deteriorate when error handling is involved.

In contrast, in Example 18-12, all the asynchronous calls for this three-stage operation are inside the same function, three_stages, and if the asynchronous calls api_call1, api_call2, and api_call3 raise exceptions we can handle them by putting the respective yield from lines inside try/except blocks.

This is a much better place than callback hell, but I wouldn’t call it coroutine heaven because there is a price to pay. Instead of regular functions, you must use coroutines and get used to yield from, so that’s the first obstacle. Once you write yield from in a function, it’s now a coroutine and you can’t simply call it, like we called api_call1(request1, stage1) in Example 18-11 to start the callback chain. You must explicitly schedule the execution of the coroutine with the event loop, or activate it using yield from in another coroutine that is scheduled for execution. Without the call loop.create_task(three_stages(request1)) in the last line, nothing would happen in Example 18-12.

The next example puts this theory into practice.

Doing Multiple Requests for Each Download

Suppose you want to save each country flag with the name of the country and the country code, instead of just the country code. Now you need to make two HTTP requests per flag: one to get the flag image itself, the other to get the metadata.json file in the same directory as the image: that’s where the name of the country is recorded.

Articulating multiple requests in the same task is easy in the threaded script: just make one request then the other, blocking the thread twice, and keeping both pieces of data (country code and name) in local variables, ready to use when saving the files. If you need to do the same in an asynchronous script with callbacks, you start to smell the sulfur of callback hell: the country code and name will need to be passed around in a closure or held somewhere until you can save the file because each callback runs in a different local context. Coroutines and yield from provide relief from that. The solution is not as simple as with threads, but more manageable than chained or nested callbacks.

Example 18-13 shows code from the third variation of the asyncio flag downloading script, using the country name to save each flag. The download_many and downloader_coro are unchanged from flags2_asyncio.py (Examples 18-7 and 18-8). The changes are:

download_one

This coroutine now uses yield from to delegate to get_flag and the new get_country coroutine.

get_flag

Most code from this coroutine was moved to a new http_get coroutine so it can also be used by get_country.

get_country

This coroutine fetches the metadata.json file for the country code, and gets the name of the country from it.

http_get

Common code for getting a file from the Web.

Example 18-13. flags3_asyncio.py: more coroutine delegation to perform two requests per flag

@asyncio.coroutine
def http_get(url):
    res = yield from aiohttp.request('GET', url)
    if res.status == 200:
        ctype = res.headers.get('Content-type', '').lower()
        if 'json' in ctype or url.endswith('json'):
            data = yield from res.json()
        else:
            data = yield from res.read()
        return data

    elif res.status == 404:
        raise web.HTTPNotFound()
    else:
        raise aiohttp.errors.HttpProcessingError(
            code=res.status, message=res.reason,
            headers=res.headers)

@asyncio.coroutine
def get_country(base_url, cc):
    url = '{}/{cc}/metadata.json'.format(base_url, cc=cc.lower())
    metadata = yield from http_get(url)
    return metadata['country']

@asyncio.coroutine
def get_flag(base_url, cc):
    url = '{}/{cc}/{cc}.gif'.format(base_url, cc=cc.lower())
    return (yield from http_get(url))

@asyncio.coroutine
def download_one(cc, base_url, semaphore, verbose):
    try:
        with (yield from semaphore):
            image = yield from get_flag(base_url, cc)
        with (yield from semaphore):
            country = yield from get_country(base_url, cc)
    except web.HTTPNotFound:
        status = HTTPStatus.not_found
        msg = 'not found'
    except Exception as exc:
        raise FetchError(cc) from exc
    else:
        country = country.replace(' ', '_')
        filename = '{}-{}.gif'.format(country, cc)
        loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
        loop.run_in_executor(None, save_flag, image, filename)
        status = HTTPStatus.ok
        msg = 'OK'

    if verbose and msg:
        print(cc, msg)

    return Result(status, cc)

If the content type has 'json' in it or the url ends with .json, use the response .json() method to parse it and return a Python data structure—in this case, a dict.

Otherwise, use .read() to fetch the bytes as they are.

metadata will receive a Python dict built from the JSON contents.

The outer parentheses here are required because the Python parser gets confused and produces a syntax error when it sees the keywords return yield from lined up like that.

I put the calls to get_flag and get_country in separate with blocks controlled by the semaphore because I want to keep it acquired for the shortest possible time.

The yield from syntax appears nine times in Example 18-13. By now you should be getting the hang of how this construct is used to delegate from one coroutine to another without blocking the event loop.

The challenge is to know when you have to use yield from and when you can’t use it. The answer in principle is easy, you yield from coroutines and asyncio.Future instances—including tasks. But some APIs are tricky, mixing coroutines and plain functions in seemingly arbitrary ways, like the StreamWriter class we’ll use in one of the servers in the next section.

Example 18-13 wraps up the flags2 set of examples. I encourage you to play with them to develop an intuition of how concurrent HTTP clients perform. Use the -a, -e, and -l command-line options to control the number of downloads, and the -m option to set the number of concurrent downloads. Run tests against the LOCAL, REMOTE, DELAY, and ERROR servers. Discover the optimum number of concurrent downloads to maximize throughput against each server. Tweak the settings of the vaurien_error_delay.sh script to add or remove errors and delays.

We’ll now go from client scripts to writing servers with asyncio.

Writing asyncio Servers

The classic toy example of a TCP server is an echo server. We’ll build slightly more interesting toys: Unicode character finders, first using plain TCP, then using HTTP. These servers will allow clients to query for Unicode characters based on words in their canonical names, using the unicodedata module we discussed in “The Unicode Database”. A Telnet session with the TCP character finder server, searching for chess pieces and characters with the word “sun” is shown in Figure 18-2.

Figure 18-2. A Telnet session with the tcp_charfinder.py server: querying for “chess black” and “sun”.

Now, on to the implementations.

An asyncio TCP Server

Most of the logic in these examples is in the charfinder.py module, which has nothing concurrent about it. You can use charfinder.py as a command-line character finder, but more importantly, it was designed to provide content for our asyncio servers. The code for charfinder.py is in the Fluent Python code repository.

The charfinder module indexes each word that appears in character names in the Unicode database bundled with Python, and creates an inverted index stored in a dict. For example, the inverted index entry for the key 'SUN' contains a set with the 10 Unicode characters that have that word in their names. The inverted index is saved in a local charfinder_index.pickle file. If multiple words appear in the query, charfinder computes the intersection of the sets retrieved from the index.

We’ll now focus on the tcp_charfinder.py script that is answering the queries in Figure 18-2. Because I have a lot to say about this code, I’ve split it into two parts: Example 18-14 and Example 18-15.

Example 18-14. tcp_charfinder.py: a simple TCP server using asyncio.start_server; code for this module continues in Example 18-15

import sys
import asyncio

from charfinder import UnicodeNameIndex

CRLF = b'\r\n'
PROMPT = b'?> '

index = UnicodeNameIndex()

@asyncio.coroutine
def handle_queries(reader, writer):
    while True:
        writer.write(PROMPT)  # can't yield from!
        yield from writer.drain()  # must yield from!
        data = yield from reader.readline()
        try:
            query = data.decode().strip()
        except UnicodeDecodeError:
            query = '\x00'
        client = writer.get_extra_info('peername')
        print('Received from {}: {!r}'.format(client, query))
        if query:
            if ord(query[:1]) < 32:
                break
            lines = list(index.find_description_strs(query))
            if lines:
                writer.writelines(line.encode() + CRLF for line in lines)
            writer.write(index.status(query, len(lines)).encode() + CRLF)

            yield from writer.drain()
            print('Sent {} results'.format(len(lines)))

    print('Close the client socket')
    writer.close()

UnicodeNameIndex is the class that builds the index of names and provides querying methods.

When instantiated, UnicodeNameIndex uses charfinder_index.pickle, if available, or builds it, so the first run may take a few seconds longer to start.⁸

This is the coroutine we need to pass to asyncio_startserver; the arguments received are an asyncio.StreamReader and an asyncio.StreamWriter.

This loop handles a session that lasts until any control character is received from the client.

The StreamWriter.write method is not a coroutine, just a plain function; this line sends the ?> prompt.

StreamWriter.drain flushes the writer buffer; it is a coroutine, so it must be called with yield from.

StreamWriter.readline is a coroutine; it returns bytes.

A UnicodeDecodeError may happen when the Telnet client sends control characters; if that happens, we pretend a null character was sent, for simplicity.

This returns the remote address to which the socket is connected.

Log the query to the server console.

Exit the loop if a control or null character was received.

This returns a generator that yields strings with the Unicode codepoint, the actual character and its name (e.g., U+0039\t9\tDIGIT NINE); for simplicity, I build a list from it.

Send the lines converted to bytes using the default UTF-8 encoding, appending a carriage return and a line feed to each; note that the argument is a generator expression.

Write a status line such as 627 matches for 'digit'.

Flush the output buffer.

Log the response to the server console.

Log the end of the session to the server console.

Close the StreamWriter.

The handle_queries coroutine has a plural name because it starts an interactive session and handles multiple queries from each client.

Note that all I/O in Example 18-14 is in bytes. We need to decode the strings received from the network, and encode strings sent out. In Python 3, the default encoding is UTF-8, and that’s what we are using implicitly.

One caveat is that some of the I/O methods are coroutines and must be driven with yield from, while others are simple functions. For example, StreamWriter.write is a plain function, on the assumption that most of the time it does not block because it writes to a buffer. On the other hand, StreamWriter.drain, which flushes the buffer and performs the actual I/O is a coroutine, as is Streamreader.readline. While I was writing this book, a major improvement to the asyncio API docs was the clear labeling of coroutines as such.

Example 18-15 lists the main function for the module started in Example 18-14.

Example 18-15. tcp_charfinder.py (continued from Example 18-14): the main function sets up and tears down the event loop and the socket server

def main(address='127.0.0.1', port=2323):
    port = int(port)
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    server_coro = asyncio.start_server(handle_queries, address, port,
                                loop=loop)
    server = loop.run_until_complete(server_coro)

    host = server.sockets[0].getsockname()
    print('Serving on {}. Hit CTRL-C to stop.'.format(host))
    try:
        loop.run_forever()
    except KeyboardInterrupt:  # CTRL+C pressed
        pass

    print('Server shutting down.')
    server.close()
    loop.run_until_complete(server.wait_closed())
    loop.close()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main(*sys.argv[1:])

The main function can be called with no arguments.

When completed, the coroutine object returned by asyncio.start_server returns an instance of asyncio.Server, a TCP socket server.

Drive server_coro to bring up the server.

Get address and port of the first socket of the server and…

…display it on the server console. This is the first output generated by this script on the server console.

Run the event loop; this is where main will block until killed when CTRL-C is pressed on the server console.

Close the server.

server.wait_closed() returns a future; use loop.run_until_complete to let the future do its job.

Terminate the event loop.

This is a shortcut for handling optional command-line arguments: explode sys.argv[1:] and pass it to a main function with suitable default arguments.

Note how run_until_complete accepts either a coroutine (the result of start_server) or a Future (the result of server.wait_closed). If run_until_complete gets a coroutine as argument, it wraps the coroutine in a Task.

You may find it easier to understand how control flows in tcp_charfinder.py if you take a close look at the output it generates on the server console, listed in Example 18-16.

Example 18-16. tcp_charfinder.py: this is the server side of the session depicted in Figure 18-2

$ python3 tcp_charfinder.py
Serving on ('127.0.0.1', 2323). Hit CTRL-C to stop.
Received from ('127.0.0.1', 62910): 'chess black'
Sent 6 results
Received from ('127.0.0.1', 62910): 'sun'
Sent 10 results
Received from ('127.0.0.1', 62910): '\x00'
Close the client socket

This is output by main.

First iteration of the while loop in handle_queries.

Second iteration of the while loop.

The user hit CTRL-C; the server receives a control character and closes the session.

The client socket is closed but the server is still running, ready to service another client.

Note how main almost immediately displays the Serving on... message and blocks in the loop.run_forever() call. At that point, control flows into the event loop and stays there, occasionally coming back to the handle_queries coroutine, which yields control back to the event loop whenever it needs to wait for the network as it sends or receives data. While the event loop is alive, a new instance of the handle_queries coroutine will be started for each client that connects to the server. In this way, multiple clients can be handled concurrently by this simple server. This continues until a KeyboardInterrupt occurs or the process is killed by the OS.

The tcp_charfinder.py code leverages the high-level asyncio Streams API that provides a ready-to-use server so you only need to implement a handler function, which can be a plain callback or a coroutine. There is also a lower-level Transports and Protocols API, inspired by the transport and protocols abstractions in the Twisted framework. Refer to the asyncio Transports and Protocols documentation for more information, including a TCP echo server implemented with that lower-level API.

The next section presents an HTTP character finder server.

An aiohttp Web Server

The aiohttp library we used for the asyncio flags examples also supports server-side HTTP, so that’s what I used to implement the http_charfinder.py script. Figure 18-3 shows the simple web interface of the server, displaying the result of a search for a “cat face” emoji.

Figure 18-3. Browser window displaying search results for “cat face” on the http_charfinder.py server

Warning

Some browsers are better than others at displaying Unicode. The screenshot in Figure 18-3 was captured with Firefox on OS X, and I got the same result with Safari. But up-to-date Chrome and Opera browsers on the same machine did not display emoji characters like the cat faces. Other search results (e.g., “chess”) looked fine, so it’s likely a font issue on Chrome and Opera on OSX.

We’ll start by analyzing the most interesting part of http_charfinder.py: the bottom half where the event loop and the HTTP server is set up and torn down. See Example 18-17.

Example 18-17. http_charfinder.py: the main and init functions

@asyncio.coroutine
def init(loop, address, port):
    app = web.Application(loop=loop)
    app.router.add_route('GET', '/', home)
    handler = app.make_handler()
    server = yield from loop.create_server(handler,
                                           address, port)
    return server.sockets[0].getsockname()

def main(address="127.0.0.1", port=8888):
    port = int(port)
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    host = loop.run_until_complete(init(loop, address, port))
    print('Serving on {}. Hit CTRL-C to stop.'.format(host))
    try:
        loop.run_forever()
    except KeyboardInterrupt:  # CTRL+C pressed
        pass
    print('Server shutting down.')
    loop.close()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main(*sys.argv[1:])

The init coroutine yields a server for the event loop to drive.

The aiohttp.web.Application class represents a web application…

…with routes mapping URL patterns to handler functions; here GET / is routed to the home function (see Example 18-18).

The app.make_handler method returns an aiohttp.web.RequestHandler instance to handle HTTP requests according to the routes set up in the app object.

create_server brings up the server, using handler as the protocol handler and binding it to address and port.

Return the address and port of the first server socket.

Run init to start the server and get its address and port.

Run the event loop; main will block here while the event loop is in control.

Close the event loop.

As you get acquainted with the asyncio API, it’s interesting to contrast how the servers are set up in Example 18-17 and in the TCP example (Example 18-15) shown earlier.

In the earlier TCP example, the server was created and scheduled to run in the main function with these two lines:

    server_coro = asyncio.start_server(handle_queries, address, port,
                                loop=loop)
    server = loop.run_until_complete(server_coro)

In the HTTP example, the init function creates the server like this:

    server = yield from loop.create_server(handler,
                                           address, port)

But init itself is a coroutine, and what makes it run is the main function, with this line:

    host = loop.run_until_complete(init(loop, address, port))

Both asyncio.start_server and loop.create_server are coroutines that return asyncio.Server objects. In order to start up a server and return a reference to it, each of these coroutines must be driven to completion. In the TCP example, that was done by calling loop.run_until_complete(server_coro), where server_coro was the result of asyncio.start_server. In the HTTP example, create_server is invoked on a yield_from expression inside the init coroutine, which is in turn driven by the main function when it calls loop.run_until_complete(init(...)).

I mention this to emphasize this essential fact we’ve discussed before: a coroutine only does anything when driven, and to drive an asyncio.coroutine you either use yield from or pass it to one of several asyncio functions that take coroutine or future arguments, such as run_until_complete.

Example 18-18 shows the home function, which is configured to handle the / (root) URL in our HTTP server.

Example 18-18. http_charfinder.py: the home function

def home(request):
    query = request.GET.get('query', '').strip()
    print('Query: {!r}'.format(query))
    if query:
        descriptions = list(index.find_descriptions(query))
        res = '\n'.join(ROW_TPL.format(**vars(descr))
                        for descr in descriptions)
        msg = index.status(query, len(descriptions))
    else:
        descriptions = []
        res = ''
        msg = 'Enter words describing characters.'

    html = template.format(query=query, result=res,
                           message=msg)
    print('Sending {} results'.format(len(descriptions)))
    return web.Response(content_type=CONTENT_TYPE, text=html)

A route handler receives an aiohttp.web.Request instance.

Get the query string stripped of leading and trailing blanks.

Log query to server console.

If there was a query, bind res to HTML table rows rendered from result of the query to the index, and msg to a status message.

Render the HTML page.

Log response to server console.

Build Response and return it.

Note that home is not a coroutine, and does not need to be if there are no yield from expressions in it. The aiohttp documentation for the add_route method states that the handler “is converted to coroutine internally when it is a regular function.”

There is a downside to the simplicity of the home function in Example 18-18. The fact that it’s a plain function and not a coroutine is a symptom of a larger issue: the need to rethink how we code web applications to achieve high concurrency. Let’s consider this matter.

Smarter Clients for Better Concurrency

The home function in Example 18-18 looks very much like a view function in Django or Flask. There is nothing asynchronous about its implementation: it gets a request, fetches data from a database, and builds a response by rendering a full HTML page. In this example, the “database” is the UnicodeNameIndex object, which is in memory. But accessing a real database should be done asynchronously, otherwise you’re blocking the event loop while waiting for database results. For example, the aiopg package provides an asynchronous PostgreSQL driver compatible with asyncio; it lets you use yield from to send queries and fetch results, so your view function can behave as a proper coroutine.

Besides avoiding blocking calls, highly concurrent systems must split large chunks of work into smaller pieces to stay responsive. The http_charfinder.py server illustrates this point: if you search for “cjk” you’ll get back 75,821 Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ideographs.⁹ In this case, the home function will return a 5.3 MB HTML document, featuring a table with 75,821 rows.

On my machine, it takes 2s to fetch the response to the “cjk” query, using the curl command-line HTTP client from a local http_charfinder.py server. A browser takes even longer to actually layout the page with such a huge table. Of course, most queries return much smaller responses: a query for “braille” returns 256 rows in a 19 KB page and takes 0.017s on my machine. But if the server spends 2s serving a single “cjk” query, all the other clients will be waiting for at least 2s, and that is not acceptable.

The way to avoid the long response problem is to implement pagination: return results with at most, say, 200 rows, and have the user click or scroll the page to fetch more. If you look up the charfinder.py module in the Fluent Python code repository, you’ll see that the UnicodeNameIndex.find_descriptions method takes optional start and stop arguments: they are offsets to support pagination. So you could return the first 200 results, then use AJAX or even WebSockets to send the next batch when—and if—the user wants to see it.

Most of the necessary coding for sending results in batches would be on the browser. This explains why Google and all large-scale Internet properties rely on lots of client-side coding to build their services: smart asynchronous clients make better use of server resources.

Although smart clients can help even old-style Django applications, to really serve them well we need frameworks that support asynchronous programming all the way: from the handling of HTTP requests and responses, to the database access. This is especially true if you want to implement real-time services such as games and media streaming with WebSockets.¹⁰

Enhancing http_charfinder.py to support progressive download is left as an exercise to the reader. Bonus points if you implement “infinite scroll,” like Twitter does. With this challenge, I wrap up our coverage of concurrent programming with asyncio.

Chapter Summary

This chapter introduced a whole new way of coding concurrency in Python, leveraging yield from, coroutines, futures, and the asyncio event loop. The first simple examples, the spinner scripts, were designed to demonstrate a side-by-side comparison of the threading and the asyncio approaches to concurrency.

We then discussed the specifics of asyncio.Future, focusing on its support for yield from, and its relationship with coroutines and asyncio.Task. Next, we analyzed the asyncio-based flag download script.

We then reflected on Ryan Dahl’s numbers for I/O latency and the effect of blocking calls. To keep a program alive despite the inevitable blocking functions, there are two solutions: using threads or asynchronous calls—the latter being implemented as callbacks or coroutines.

In practice, asynchronous libraries depend on lower-level threads to work—down to kernel-level threads—but the user of the library doesn’t create threads and doesn’t need to be aware of their use in the infrastructure. At the application level, we just make sure none of our code is blocking, and the event loop takes care of the concurrency under the hood. Avoiding the overhead of user-level threads is the main reason why asynchronous systems can manage more concurrent connections than multithreaded systems.

Resuming the flag downloading examples, adding a progress bar and proper error handling required significant refactoring, particularly with the switch from asyncio.wait to asyncio.as_completed, which forced us to move most of the functionality of download_many to a new downloader_coro coroutine, so we could use yield from to get the results from the futures produced by asyncio.as_completed, one by one.

We then saw how to delegate blocking jobs—such as saving a file—to a thread pool using the loop.run_in_executor method.

This was followed by a discussion of how coroutines solve the main problems of callbacks: loss of context when carrying out multistep asynchronous tasks, and lack of a proper context for error handling.

The next example—fetching the country names along with the flag images—demonstrated how the combination of coroutines and yield from avoids the so-called callback hell. A multistep procedure making asynchronous calls with yield from looks like simple sequential code, if you pay no attention to the yield from keywords.

The final examples in the chapter were asyncio TCP and HTTP servers that allow searching for Unicode characters by name. Analysis of the HTTP server ended with a discussion on the importance of client-side JavaScript to support higher concurrency on the server side, by enabling the client to make smaller requests on demand, instead of downloading large HTML pages.

Further Reading

Nick Coghlan, a Python core developer, made the following comment on the draft of PEP-3156 — Asynchronous IO Support Rebooted: the “asyncio” Module in January 2013:

Somewhere early in the PEP, there may need to be a concise description of the two APIs for waiting for an asynchronous Future:

f.add_done_callback(…)

yield from f in a coroutine (resumes the coroutine when the future completes, with either the result or exception as appropriate)

At the moment, these are buried in amongst much larger APIs, yet they’re key to understanding the way everything above the core event loop layer interacts.¹¹

Guido van Rossum, the author of PEP-3156, did not heed Coghlan’s advice. Starting with PEP-3156, the asyncio documentation is very detailed but not user friendly. The nine .rst files that make up the asyncio package docs total 128 KB—that’s roughly 71 pages. In the standard library, only the “Built-in Types” chapter is bigger, and it covers the API for the numeric types, sequence types, generators, mappings, sets, bool, context managers, etc.

Most pages in the asyncio manual focus on concepts and the API. There are useful diagrams and examples scattered all over it, but one section that is very practical is “18.5.11. Develop with asyncio,” which presents essential usage patterns. The asyncio docs need more content explaining how asyncio should be used.

Because it’s very new, asyncio lacks coverage in print. Jan Palach’s Parallel Programming with Python (Packt, 2014) is the only book I found that has a chapter about asyncio, but it’s a short chapter.

There are, however, excellent presentations about asyncio. The best I found is Brett Slatkin’s “Fan-In and Fan-Out: The Crucial Components of Concurrency,” subtitled “Why do we need Tulip? (a.k.a., PEP 3156—asyncio),” which he presented at PyCon 2014 in Montréal (video). In 30 minutes, Slatkin shows a simple web crawler example, highlighting how asyncio is intended to be used. Guido van Rossum is in the audience and mentions that he also wrote a web crawler as a motivating example for asyncio; Guido’s code does not depend on aiohttp—it uses only the standard library. Slatkin also wrote the insightful post “Python’s asyncio Is for Composition, Not Raw Performance.”

Other must-see asyncio talks are by Guido van Rossum himself: the PyCon US 2013 keynote, and talks he gave at LinkedIn and Twitter University. Also recommended are Saúl Ibarra Corretgé’s “A Deep Dive into PEP-3156 and the New asyncio Module” (slides, video).

Dino Viehland showed how asyncio can be integrated with the Tkinter event loop in his “Using futures for async GUI programming in Python 3.3” talk at PyCon US 2013. Viehland shows how easy it is to implement the essential parts of the asyncio.AbstractEventLoop interface on top of another event loop. His code was written with Tulip, prior to the addition of asyncio to the standard library; I adapted it to work with the Python 3.4 release of asyncio. My updated refactoring is on GitHub.

Victor Stinner—an asyncio core contributor and author of the Trollius backport—regularly updates a list of relevant links: The new Python asyncio module aka “tulip”. Other collections of asyncio resources are Asyncio.org and aio-libs on Github, where you’ll find asynchronous drivers for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and several NoSQL databases. I haven’t tested these drivers, but the projects seem very active as I write this.

Web services are going to be an important use case for asyncio. Your code will likely depend on the aiohttp library led by Andrew Svetlov. You’ll also want to set up an environment to test your error handling code, and the Vaurien “chaos TCP proxy” designed by Alexis Métaireau and Tarek Ziadé is invaluable for that. Vaurien was created for the Mozilla Services project and lets you introduce delays and random errors into the TCP traffic between your program and backend servers such as databases and web services providers.

Soapbox

The One Loop

For a long time, asynchronous programming has been the approach favored by most Pythonistas for network applications, but there was always the dilemma of picking one of the mutually incompatible libraries. Ryan Dahl cites Twisted as a source of inspiration for Node.js, and Tornado championed the use of coroutines for event-oriented programming in Python.

In the JavaScript world, there is some debate between advocates of simple callbacks and proponents of various competing higher-level abstractions. Early versions the Node.js API used Promises—similar to our Futures—but Ryan Dahl decided to standardize on callbacks only. James Coglan argues this was Node’s biggest missed opportunity.

In Python, the debate is over: the addition of asyncio to the standard library establishes coroutines and futures as the Pythonic way of writing asynchronous code. Furthermore, the asyncio package defines standard interfaces for asynchronous futures and the event loop, providing reference implementations for them.

The Zen of Python applies perfectly:

There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.

Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.

Maybe it takes a Dutch passport to find yield from obvious. It was not obvious at first for this Brazilian, but after a while I got the hang of it.

More importantly, asyncio was designed so that its event loop can be replaced by an external package. That’s why the asyncio.get_event_loop and set_event_loop functions exist; they are part of an abstract Event Loop Policy API.

Tornado already has an AsyncIOMainLoop class that implements the asyncio.AbstractEventLoop interface, so you can run asynchronous code using both libraries on the same event loop. There is also the intriguing Quamash project that integrates asyncio to the Qt event loop for developing GUI applications with PyQt or PySide. These are just two of a growing number of interoperable event-oriented packages made possible by asyncio.

Smarter HTTP clients such as single-page web applications (like Gmail) or smartphone apps demand quick, lightweight responses and push updates. These needs are better served by asynchronous frameworks instead of traditional web frameworks like Django, which are designed to serve fully rendered HTML pages and lack support for asynchronous database access.

The WebSockets protocol was designed to enable real-time updates for clients that are always connected, from games to streaming applications. This requires highly concurrent asynchronous servers able to keep ongoing interactions with hundreds or thousands of clients. WebSockets is very well supported by the asyncio architecture and at least two libraries already implement it on top of asyncio: Autobahn|Python and WebSockets.

This overall trend—dubbed “the real-time Web”—is a key factor in the demand for Node.js, and the reason why rallying around asyncio is so important for the Python ecosystem. There’s still a lot of work to do. For starters, we need an asynchronous HTTP server and client API in the standard library, an asynchronous DBAPI 3.0, and new database drivers built on asyncio.

The biggest advantage Python 3.4 with asyncio has over Node.js is Python itself: a better designed language, with coroutines and yield from to make asynchronous code more maintainable than the primitive callbacks of JavaScript. Our biggest disadvantage is the libraries: Python comes with “batteries included,” but our batteries are not designed for asynchronous programming. The rich ecosystem of libraries for Node.js is entirely built around async calls. But Python and Node.js both have a problem that Go and Erlang have solved from the start: we have no transparent way to write code that leverages all available CPU cores.

Standardizing the event loop interface and an asynchronous library was a major coup, and only our BDFL could have pulled it off, given that there were well-entrenched, high-quality alternatives available. He did it in consultation with the authors of the major Python asynchronous frameworks. The influence of Glyph Lefkowitz, the leader of Twisted, is most evident. Guido’s “Deconstructing Deferred” post to the Python-tulip group is a must-read if you want to understand why asyncio.Future is not like the Twisted Deferred class. Making clear his respect for the oldest and largest Python asynchronous framework, Guido also started the meme WWTD—What Would Twisted Do?—when discussing design options in the python-twisted group.¹²

Fortunately, Guido van Rossum led the charge so Python is better positioned to face the concurrency challenges of the present. Mastering asyncio takes effort. But if you plan to write concurrent network applications in Python, seek the One Loop:

One Loop to rule them all, One Loop to find them,

One Loop to bring them all and in liveness bind them.

¹ Slide 5 of the talk “Concurrency Is Not Parallelism (It’s Better)”.

² Imre Simon (1943–2009) was a pioneer of computer science in Brazil who made seminal contributions to Automata Theory and started the field of Tropical Mathematics. He was also an advocate of free software and free culture. I was fortunate to study, work, and hang out with him.

³ Suggested by Petr Viktorin in a September 11, 2014, message to the Python-ideas list.

⁴ Video: Introduction to Node.js at 4:55.

⁵ In fact, although Node.js does not support user-level threads written in JavaScript, behind the scenes it implements a thread pool in C with the libeio library, to provide its callback-based file APIs—because as of 2014 there are no stable and portable asynchronous file handling APIs for most OSes.

⁶ Thanks to Guto Maia who noted that Semaphore was not explained in the book draft.

⁷ A detailed discussion about this can be found in a thread I started in the python-tulip group, titled “Which other futures my come out of asyncio.as_completed?”. Guido responds, and gives insight on the implementation of as_completed as well as the close relationship between futures and coroutines in asyncio.

⁸ Leonardo Rochael pointed out that building the UnicodeNameIndex could be delegated to another thread using loop.run_with_executor() in the main function of Example 18-15, so the server would be ready to take requests immediately while the index is built. That is true, but querying the index is the only thing this app does, so that would not be a big win. It’s an interesting exercise to do as Leo suggests, though. Go ahead and do it, if you like.

⁹ That’s what CJK stands for: the ever-expanding set of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. Future versions of Python may support more CJK ideographs than Python 3.4 does.

¹⁰ I have more to say about this trend in “Soapbox”.

¹¹ Comment on PEP-3156 in a Jan. 20, 2013 message to the python-ideas list.

¹² See Guido’s January 29, 2015, message, immediately followed by an answer from Glyph.

Part VI. Metaprogramming

Chapter 19. Dynamic Attributes and Properties

The crucial importance of properties is that their existence makes it perfectly safe and indeed advisable for you to expose public data attributes as part of your class’s public interface.¹

Alex Martelli, Python contributor and book author

Data attributes and methods are collectively known as attributes in Python: a method is just an attribute that is callable. Besides data attributes and methods, we can also create properties, which can be used to replace a public data attribute with accessor methods (i.e., getter/setter), without changing the class interface. This agrees with the Uniform access principle:

All services offered by a module should be available through a uniform notation, which does not betray whether they are implemented through storage or through computation.²

Besides properties, Python provides a rich API for controlling attribute access and implementing dynamic attributes. The interpreter calls special methods such as __getattr__ and __setattr__ to evaluate attribute access using dot notation (e.g., obj.attr). A user-defined class implementing __getattr__ can implement “virtual attributes” by computing values on the fly whenever somebody tries to read a nonexistent attribute like obj.no_such_attribute.

Coding dynamic attributes is the kind of metaprogramming that framework authors do. However, in Python, the basic techniques are so straightforward that anyone can put them to work, even for everyday data wrangling tasks. That’s how we’ll start this chapter.

Data Wrangling with Dynamic Attributes

In the next few examples, we’ll leverage dynamic attributes to work with a JSON data feed published by O’Reilly for the OSCON 2014 conference. Example 19-1 shows four records from that data feed.³

Example 19-1. Sample records from osconfeed.json; some field contents abbreviated

{ "Schedule":
  { "conferences": [{"serial": 115 }],
    "events": [
      { "serial": 34505,
        "name": "Why Schools Don´t Use Open Source to Teach Programming",
        "event_type": "40-minute conference session",
        "time_start": "2014-07-23 11:30:00",
        "time_stop": "2014-07-23 12:10:00",
        "venue_serial": 1462,
        "description": "Aside from the fact that high school programming...",
        "website_url": "http://oscon.com/oscon2014/public/schedule/detail/34505",
        "speakers": [157509],
        "categories": ["Education"] }
    ],
    "speakers": [
      { "serial": 157509,
        "name": "Robert Lefkowitz",
        "photo": null,
        "url": "http://sharewave.com/",
        "position": "CTO",
        "affiliation": "Sharewave",
        "twitter": "sharewaveteam",
        "bio": "Robert ´r0ml´ Lefkowitz is the CTO at Sharewave, a startup..." }
    ],
    "venues": [
      { "serial": 1462,
        "name": "F151",
        "category": "Conference Venues" }
    ]
  }
}

Example 19-1 shows 4 out of the 895 records in the JSON feed. As you can see, the entire dataset is a single JSON object with the key "Schedule", and its value is another mapping with four keys: "conferences", "events", "speakers", and "venues". Each of those four keys is paired with a list of records. In Example 19-1, each list has one record, but in the full dataset, those lists have dozens or hundreds of records—with the exception of "conferences", which holds just the single record shown. Every item in those four lists has a "serial" field, which is a unique identifier within the list.

The first script I wrote to deal with the OSCON feed simply downloads the feed, avoiding unnecessary traffic by checking if there is a local copy. This makes sense because OSCON 2014 is history now, so that feed will not be updated.

There is no metaprogramming in Example 19-2; pretty much everything boils down to this expression: json.load(fp), but that’s enough to let us explore the dataset. The osconfeed.load function will be used in the next several examples.

Example 19-2. osconfeed.py: downloading osconfeed.json (doctests are in Example 19-3)

from urllib.request import urlopen
import warnings
import os
import json

URL = 'http://www.oreilly.com/pub/sc/osconfeed'
JSON = 'data/osconfeed.json'

def load():
    if not os.path.exists(JSON):
        msg = 'downloading {} to {}'.format(URL, JSON)
        warnings.warn(msg)
        with urlopen(URL) as remote, open(JSON, 'wb') as local:
            local.write(remote.read())

    with open(JSON) as fp:
        return json.load(fp)

Issue a warning if a new download will be made.

with using two context managers (allowed since Python 2.7 and 3.1) to read the remote file and save it.

The json.load function parses a JSON file and returns native Python objects. In this feed, we have the types: dict, list, str, and int.

With the code in Example 19-2, we can inspect any field in the data. See Example 19-3.

Example 19-3. osconfeed.py: doctests for Example 19-2

    >>> feed = load()
    >>> sorted(feed['Schedule'].keys())
    ['conferences', 'events', 'speakers', 'venues']
    >>> for key, value in sorted(feed['Schedule'].items()):
    ...     print('{:3} {}'.format(len(value), key))
    ...
      1 conferences
    484 events
    357 speakers
     53 venues
    >>> feed['Schedule']['speakers'][-1]['name']
    'Carina C. Zona'
    >>> feed['Schedule']['speakers'][-1]['serial']
    141590
    >>> feed['Schedule']['events'][40]['name']
    'There *Will* Be Bugs'
    >>> feed['Schedule']['events'][40]['speakers']
    [3471, 5199]

feed is a dict holding nested dicts and lists, with string and integer values.

List the four record collections inside "Schedule".

Display record counts for each collection.

Navigate through the nested dicts and lists to get the name of the last speaker.

Get serial number of that same speaker.

Each event has a 'speakers' list with 0 or more speaker serial numbers.

Exploring JSON-Like Data with Dynamic Attributes

Example 19-2 is simple enough, but the syntax feed['Schedule']['events'][40]['name'] is cumbersome. In JavaScript, you can get the same value by writing feed.Schedule.events[40].name. It’s easy to implement a dict-like class that does the same in Python—there are plenty of implementations on the Web.⁴ I implemented my own FrozenJSON, which is simpler than most recipes because it supports reading only: it’s just for exploring the data. However, it’s also recursive, dealing automatically with nested mappings and lists.

Example 19-4 is a demonstration of FrozenJSON and the source code is in Example 19-5.

Example 19-4. FrozenJSON from Example 19-5 allows reading attributes like name and calling methods like .keys() and .items()

    >>> from osconfeed import load
    >>> raw_feed = load()
    >>> feed = FrozenJSON(raw_feed)
    >>> len(feed.Schedule.speakers)
    357
    >>> sorted(feed.Schedule.keys())
    ['conferences', 'events', 'speakers', 'venues']
    >>> for key, value in sorted(feed.Schedule.items()):
    ...     print('{:3} {}'.format(len(value), key))
    ...
      1 conferences
    484 events
    357 speakers
     53 venues
    >>> feed.Schedule.speakers[-1].name
    'Carina C. Zona'
    >>> talk = feed.Schedule.events[40]
    >>> type(talk)
    <class 'explore0.FrozenJSON'>
    >>> talk.name
    'There *Will* Be Bugs'
    >>> talk.speakers
    [3471, 5199]
    >>> talk.flavor
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      ...
    KeyError: 'flavor'

Build a FrozenJSON instance from the raw_feed made of nested dicts and lists.

FrozenJSON allows traversing nested dicts by using attribute notation; here we show the length of the list of speakers.

Methods of the underlying dicts can also be accessed, like .keys(), to retrieve the record collection names.

Using items(), we can retrieve the record collection names and their contents, to display the len() of each of them.

A list, such as feed.Schedule.speakers, remains a list, but the items inside are converted to FrozenJSON if they are mappings.

Item 40 in the events list was a JSON object; now it’s a FrozenJSON instance.

Event records have a speakers list with speaker serial numbers.

Trying to read a missing attribute raises KeyError, instead of the usual AttributeError.

The keystone of the FrozenJSON class is the __getattr__ method, which we already used in the Vector example in “Vector Take #3: Dynamic Attribute Access”, to retrieve Vector components by letter—v.x, v.y, v.z, etc. It’s essential to recall that the __getattr__ special method is only invoked by the interpreter when the usual process fails to retrieve an attribute (i.e., when the named attribute cannot be found in the instance, nor in the class or in its superclasses).

The last line of Example 19-4 exposes a minor issue with the implementation: ideally, trying to read a missing attribute should raise AttributeError. I actually did implement the error handling, but it doubled the size of the __getattr__ method and distracted from the most important logic I wanted to show, so I left it out for didactic reasons.

As shown in Example 19-5, the FrozenJSON class has only two methods (__init__, __getattr__) and a __data instance attribute, so attempts to retrieve an attribute by any other name will trigger __getattr__. This method will first look if the self.__data dict has an attribute (not a key!) by that name; this allows FrozenJSON instances to handle any dict method such as items, by delegating to self.__data.items(). If self.___data doesn’t have an attribute with the given name, __getattr__ uses name as a key to retrieve an item from self.__dict, and passes that item to FrozenJSON.build. This allows navigating through nested structures in the JSON data, as each nested mapping is converted to another FrozenJSON instance by the build class method.

Example 19-5. explore0.py: turn a JSON dataset into a FrozenJSON holding nested FrozenJSON objects, lists, and simple types

from collections import abc

class FrozenJSON:
    """A read-only façade for navigating a JSON-like object
       using attribute notation
    """

    def __init__(self, mapping):
        self.__data = dict(mapping)

    def __getattr__(self, name):
        if hasattr(self.__data, name):
            return getattr(self.__data, name)
        else:
            return FrozenJSON.build(self.__data[name])

    @classmethod
    def build(cls, obj):
        if isinstance(obj, abc.Mapping):
            return cls(obj)
        elif isinstance(obj, abc.MutableSequence):
            return [cls.build(item) for item in obj]
        else:
            return obj

Build a dict from the mapping argument. This serves two purposes: ensures we got a dict (or something that can be converted to one) and makes a copy for safety.

__getattr__ is called only when there’s no attribute with that name.

If name matches an attribute of the instance __data, return that. This is how calls to methods like keys are handled.

Otherwise, fetch the item with the key name from self.__data, and return the result of calling FrozenJSON.build() on that.⁵

This is an alternate constructor, a common use for the @classmethod decorator.

If obj is a mapping, build a FrozenJSON with it.

If it is a MutableSequence, it must be a list,⁶ so we build a list by passing every item in obj recursively to .build().

If it’s not a dict or a list, return the item as it is.

Note that no caching or transformation of the original feed is done. As the feed is traversed, the nested data structures are converted again and again into FrozenJSON. But that’s OK for a dataset of this size, and for a script that will only be used to explore or convert the data.

Any script that generates or emulates dynamic attribute names from arbitrary sources must deal with one issue: the keys in the original data may not be suitable attribute names. The next section addresses this.

The Invalid Attribute Name Problem

The FrozenJSON class has a limitation: there is no special handling for attribute names that are Python keywords. For example, if you build an object like this:

>>> grad = FrozenJSON({'name': 'Jim Bo', 'class': 1982})

You won’t be able to read grad.class because class is a reserved word in Python:

>>> grad.class
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    grad.class
             ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

You can always do this, of course:

>>> getattr(grad, 'class')
1982

But the idea of FrozenJSON is to provide convenient access to the data, so a better solution is checking whether a key in the mapping given to FrozenJSON.__init__ is a keyword, and if so, append an _ to it, so the attribute can be read like this:

>>> grad.class_
1982

This can be achieved by replacing the one-liner __init__ from Example 19-5 with the version in Example 19-6.

Example 19-6. explore1.py: append a _ to attribute names that are Python keywords

    def __init__(self, mapping):
        self.__data = {}
        for key, value in mapping.items():
            if keyword.iskeyword(key):
                key += '_'
            self.__data[key] = value

The keyword.iskeyword(…) function is exactly what we need; to use it, the keyword module must be imported, which is not shown in this snippet.

A similar problem may arise if a key in the JSON is not a valid Python identifier:

>>> x = FrozenJSON({'2be':'or not'})
>>> x.2be
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    x.2be
      ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Such problematic keys are easy to detect in Python 3 because the str class provides the s.isidentifier() method, which tells you whether s is a valid Python identifier according to the language grammar. But turning a key that is not a valid identifier into valid attribute name is not trivial. Two simple solutions would be raising an exception or replacing the invalid keys with generic names like attr_0, attr_1, and so on. For the sake of simplicity, I will not worry about this issue.

After giving some thought to the dynamic attribute names, let’s turn to another essential feature of FrozenJSON: the logic of the build class method, which is used by __getattr__ to return a different type of object depending on the value of the attribute being accessed, so that nested structures are converted to FrozenJSON instances or lists of FrozenJSON instances.

Instead of a class method, the same logic could be implemented as the __new__ special method, as we’ll see next.

Flexible Object Creation with __new__

We often refer to __init__ as the constructor method, but that’s because we adopted jargon from other languages. The special method that actually constructs an instance is __new__: it’s a class method (but gets special treatment, so the @classmethod decorator is not used), and it must return an instance. That instance will in turn be passed as the first argument self of __init__. Because __init__ gets an instance when called, and it’s actually forbidden from returning anything, __init__ is really an “initializer.” The real constructor is __new__—which we rarely need to code because the implementation inherited from object suffices.

The path just described, from __new__ to __init__, is the most common, but not the only one. The __new__ method can also return an instance of a different class, and when that happens, the interpreter does not call __init__.

In other words, the process of building an object in Python can be summarized with this pseudocode:

# pseudo-code for object construction
def object_maker(the_class, some_arg):
    new_object = the_class.__new__(some_arg)
    if isinstance(new_object, the_class):
        the_class.__init__(new_object, some_arg)
    return new_object

# the following statements are roughly equivalent
x = Foo('bar')
x = object_maker(Foo, 'bar')

Example 19-7 shows a variation of FrozenJSON where the logic of the former build class method was moved to __new__.

Example 19-7. explore2.py: using new instead of build to construct new objects that may or may not be instances of FrozenJSON

from collections import abc

class FrozenJSON:
    """A read-only façade for navigating a JSON-like object
       using attribute notation
    """

    def __new__(cls, arg):
        if isinstance(arg, abc.Mapping):
            return super().__new__(cls)
        elif isinstance(arg, abc.MutableSequence):
            return [cls(item) for item in arg]
        else:
            return arg

    def __init__(self, mapping):
        self.__data = {}
        for key, value in mapping.items():
            if iskeyword(key):
                key += '_'
            self.__data[key] = value

    def __getattr__(self, name):
        if hasattr(self.__data, name):
            return getattr(self.__data, name)
        else:
            return FrozenJSON(self.__data[name])

As a class method, the first argument __new__ gets is the class itself, and the remaining arguments are the same that __init__ gets, except for self.

The default behavior is to delegate to the __new__ of a super class. In this case, we are calling __new__ from the object base class, passing FrozenJSON as the only argument.

The remaining lines of __new__ are exactly as in the old build method.

This was where FrozenJSON.build was called before; now we just call the FrozenJSON constructor.

The __new__ method gets the class as the first argument because, usually, the created object will be an instance of that class. So, in FrozenJSON.__new__, when the expression super().__new__(cls) effectively calls object.__new__(FrozenJSON), the instance built by the object class is actually an instance of FrozenJSON—i.e., the __class__ attribute of the new instance will hold a reference to FrozenJSON—even though the actual construction is performed by object.__new__, implemented in C, in the guts of the interpreter.

There is an obvious shortcoming in the way the OSCON JSON feed is structured: the event at index 40, titled 'There *Will* Be Bugs' has two speakers, 3471 and 5199, but finding them is not easy, because those are serial numbers, and the Schedule.speakers list is not indexed by them. The venue field, present in every event record, also holds the a serial number, but finding the corresponding venue record requires a linear scan of the Schedule.venues list. Our next task is restructuring the data, and then automating the retrieval of linked records.

Restructuring the OSCON Feed with shelve

The funny name of the standard shelve module makes sense when you realize that pickle is the name of the Python object serialization format—and of the module that converts objects to/from that format. Because pickle jars are kept in shelves, it makes sense that shelve provides pickle storage.

The shelve.open high-level function returns a shelve.Shelf instance—a simple key-value object database backed by the dbm module, with these characteristics:

shelve.Shelf subclasses abc.MutableMapping, so it provides the essential methods we expect of a mapping type

In addition, shelve.Shelf provides a few other I/O management methods, like sync and close; it’s also a context manager.

Keys and values are saved whenever a new value is assigned to a key.

The keys must be strings.

The values must be objects that the pickle module can handle.

Consult the documentation for the shelve, dbm, and pickle modules for the details and caveats. What matters to us now is that shelve provides a simple, efficient way to reorganize the OSCON schedule data: we will read all records from the JSON file and save them to a shelve.Shelf. Each key will be made from the record type and the serial number (e.g., 'event.33950' or 'speaker.3471') and the value will be an instance of a new Record class we are about to introduce.

Example 19-8 shows the doctests for the schedule1.py script using shelve. To try it out interactively, run the script as python -i schedule1.py to get a console prompt with the module loaded. The load_db function does the heavy work: it calls osconfeed.load (from Example 19-2) to read the JSON data and saves each record as a Record instance in the Shelf object passed as db. After that, retrieving a speaker record is as easy as speaker = db['speaker.3471'].

Example 19-8. Trying out the functionality provided by schedule1.py (Example 19-9)

    >>> import shelve
    >>> db = shelve.open(DB_NAME)
    >>> if CONFERENCE not in db:
    ...     load_db(db)
    ...
    >>> speaker = db['speaker.3471']
    >>> type(speaker)
    <class 'schedule1.Record'>
    >>> speaker.name, speaker.twitter
    ('Anna Martelli Ravenscroft', 'annaraven')
    >>> db.close()

shelve.open opens an existing or just-created database file.

A quick way to determine if the database is populated is to look for a known key, in this case conference.115—the key to the single conference record.⁷

If the database is empty, call load_db(db) to load it.

Fetch a speaker record.

It’s an instance of the Record class defined in Example 19-9.

Each Record instance implements a custom set of attributes reflecting the fields of the underlying JSON record.

Always remember to close a shelve.Shelf. If possible, use a with block to make sure the Shelf is closed.⁸

The code for schedule1.py is in Example 19-9.

Example 19-9. schedule1.py: exploring OSCON schedule data saved to a shelve.Shelf

import warnings

import osconfeed

DB_NAME = 'data/schedule1_db'
CONFERENCE = 'conference.115'

class Record:
    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        self.__dict__.update(kwargs)

def load_db(db):
    raw_data = osconfeed.load()
    warnings.warn('loading ' + DB_NAME)
    for collection, rec_list in raw_data['Schedule'].items():
        record_type = collection[:-1]
        for record in rec_list:
            key = '{}.{}'.format(record_type, record['serial'])
            record['serial'] = key
            db[key] = Record(**record)

Load the osconfeed.py module from Example 19-2.

This is a common shortcut to build an instance with attributes created from keyword arguments (detailed explanation follows).

This may fetch the JSON feed from the Web, if there’s no local copy.

Iterate over the collections (e.g., 'conferences', 'events', etc.).

record_type is set to the collection name without the trailing 's' (i.e., 'events' becomes 'event').

Build key from the record_type and the 'serial' field.

Update the 'serial' field with the full key.

Build Record instance and save it to the database under the key.

The Record.__init__ method illustrates a popular Python hack. Recall that the __dict__ of an object is where its attributes are kept—unless __slots__ is declared in the class, as we saw in “Saving Space with the __slots__ Class Attribute”. So, updating an instance __dict__ with a mapping is a quick way to create a bunch of attributes in that instance.⁹

Note

I am not going to repeat the details we discussed earlier in “The Invalid Attribute Name Problem”, but depending on the application context, the Record class may need to deal with keys that are not valid attribute names.

The definition of Record in Example 19-9 is so simple that you may be wondering why we did not use it before, instead of the more complicated FrozenJSON. There are a couple reasons. First, FrozenJSON works by recursively converting the nested mappings and lists; Record doesn’t need that because our converted dataset doesn’t have mappings nested in mappings or lists. The records contain only strings, integers, lists of strings, and lists of integers. A second reason is that FrozenJSON provides access to the embedded __data dict attributes—which we used to invoke methods like keys—and now we don’t need that functionality either.

Note

The Python standard library provides at least two classes similar to our Record, where each instance has an arbitrary set of attributes built from keyword arguments to the constructor: multiprocessing.Namespace (documentation, source code), and argparse.Namespace (documentation, source code). I implemented Record to highlight the essence of the idea: __init__ updating the instance __dict__.

After reorganizing the schedule dataset as we just did, we can now extend the Record class to provide a useful service: automatically retrieving venue and speaker records referenced in an event record. This is similar to what the Django ORM does when you access a models.ForeignKey field: instead of the key, you get the linked model object. We’ll use properties to do that in the next example.

Linked Record Retrieval with Properties

The goal of this next version is: given an event record retrieved from the shelf, reading its venue or speakers attributes will not return serial numbers but full-fledged record objects. See the partial interaction in Example 19-10 as an example.

Example 19-10. Extract from the doctests of schedule2.py

    >>> DbRecord.set_db(db)
    >>> event = DbRecord.fetch('event.33950')
    >>> event
    <Event 'There *Will* Be Bugs'>
    >>> event.venue
    <DbRecord serial='venue.1449'>
    >>> event.venue.name
    'Portland 251'
    >>> for spkr in event.speakers:
    ...     print('{0.serial}: {0.name}'.format(spkr))
    ...
    speaker.3471: Anna Martelli Ravenscroft
    speaker.5199: Alex Martelli

DbRecord extends Record, adding database support: to operate, DbRecord must be given a reference to a database.

The DbRecord.fetch class method retrieves records of any type.

Note that event is an instance of the Event class, which extends DbRecord.

Accessing event.venue returns a DbRecord instance.

Now it’s easy to find out the name of an event.venue. This automatic dereferencing is the goal of this example.

We can also iterate over the event.speakers list, retrieving DbRecords representing each speaker.

Figure 19-1 Provides an overview of the classes we’ll be studying in this section:

Record

The __init__ method is the same as in schedule1.py (Example 19-9); the __eq__ method was added to facilitate testing.

DbRecord

Subclass of Record adding a __db class attribute, set_db and get_db static methods to set/get that attribute, a fetch class method to retrieve records from the database, and a __repr__ instance method to support debugging and testing.

Event

Subclass of DbRecord adding venue and speakers properties to retrieve linked records, and a specialized __repr__ method.

Figure 19-1. UML class diagram for an enhanced Record class and two subclasses: DbRecord and Event.

The DbRecord.__db class attribute exists to hold a reference to the opened shelve.Shelf database, so it can be used by the DbRecord.fetch method and the Event.venue and Event.speakers properties that depend on it. I coded __db as a private class attribute with conventional getter and setter methods because I wanted to protect it from accidental overwriting. I did not use a property to manage __db because of a crucial fact: properties are class attributes designed to manage instance attributes.¹⁰

The code for this section is in the schedule2.py module in the Fluent Python code repository. Because the module tops 100 lines, I’ll present it in parts.¹¹

The first statements of schedule2.py are shown in Example 19-11.

Example 19-11. schedule2.py: imports, constants, and the enhanced Record class

import warnings
import inspect

import osconfeed

DB_NAME = 'data/schedule2_db'
CONFERENCE = 'conference.115'

class Record:
    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        self.__dict__.update(kwargs)

    def __eq__(self, other):
        if isinstance(other, Record):
            return self.__dict__ == other.__dict__
        else:
            return NotImplemented

inspect will be used in the load_db function (Example 19-14).

Because we are storing instances of different classes, we create and use a different database file, 'schedule2_db', instead of the 'schedule_db' of Example 19-9.

An __eq__ method is always handy for testing.

Warning

In Python 2, only “new style” classes support properties. To write a new style class in Python 2 you must subclass directly or indirectly from object. Record in Example 19-11 is the base class of a hierarchy that will use properties, so in Python 2 its declaration would start with:¹²

class Record(object):
    # etc...

The next classes defined in schedule2.py are a custom exception type and DbRecord. See Example 19-12.

Example 19-12. schedule2.py: MissingDatabaseError and DbRecord class

class MissingDatabaseError(RuntimeError):
    """Raised when a database is required but was not set."""

class DbRecord(Record):

    __db = None

    @staticmethod
    def set_db(db):
        DbRecord.__db = db

    @staticmethod
    def get_db():
        return DbRecord.__db

    @classmethod
    def fetch(cls, ident):
        db = cls.get_db()
        try:
            return db[ident]
        except TypeError:
            if db is None:
                msg = "database not set; call '{}.set_db(my_db)'"
                raise MissingDatabaseError(msg.format(cls.__name__))
            else:
                raise

    def __repr__(self):
        if hasattr(self, 'serial'):
            cls_name = self.__class__.__name__
            return '<{} serial={!r}>'.format(cls_name, self.serial)
        else:
            return super().__repr__()

Custom exceptions are usually marker classes, with no body. A docstring explaining the usage of the exception is better than a mere pass statement.

DbRecord extends Record.

The __db class attribute will hold a reference to the opened shelve.Shelf database.

set_db is a staticmethod to make it explicit that its effect is always exactly the same, no matter how it’s called.

Even if this method is invoked as Event.set_db(my_db), the __db attribute will be set in the DbRecord class.

get_db is also a staticmethod because it will always return the object referenced by DbRecord.__db, no matter how it’s invoked.

fetch is a class method so that its behavior is easier to customize in subclasses.

This retrieves the record with the ident key from the database.

If we get a TypeError and db is None, raise a custom exception explaining that the database must be set.

Otherwise, re-raise the exception because we don’t know how to handle it.

If the record has a serial attribute, use it in the string representation.

Otherwise, default to the inherited __repr__.

Now we get to the meat of the example: the Event class, listed in Example 19-13.

Example 19-13. schedule2.py: the Event class

class Event(DbRecord):

    @property
    def venue(self):
        key = 'venue.{}'.format(self.venue_serial)
        return self.__class__.fetch(key)

    @property
    def speakers(self):
        if not hasattr(self, '_speaker_objs'):
            spkr_serials = self.__dict__['speakers']
            fetch = self.__class__.fetch
            self._speaker_objs = [fetch('speaker.{}'.format(key))
                                  for key in spkr_serials]
        return self._speaker_objs

    def __repr__(self):
        if hasattr(self, 'name'):
            cls_name = self.__class__.__name__
            return '<{} {!r}>'.format(cls_name, self.name)
        else:
            return super().__repr__()

Event extends DbRecord.

The venue property builds a key from the venue_serial attribute, and passes it to the fetch class method, inherited from DbRecord (see explanation after this example).

The speakers property checks if the record has a _speaker_objs attribute.

If it doesn’t, the 'speakers' attribute is retrieved directly from the instance __dict__ to avoid an infinite recursion, because the public name of this property is also speakers.

Get a reference to the fetch class method (the reason for this will be explained shortly).

self._speaker_objs is loaded with a list of speaker records, using fetch.

That list is returned.

If the record has a name attribute, use it in the string representation.

Otherwise, default to the inherited __repr__.

In the venue property of Example 19-13, the last line returns self.__class__.fetch(key). Why not write that simply as self.fetch(key)? The simpler formula works with the specific dataset of the OSCON feed because there is no event record with a 'fetch' key. If even a single event record had a key named 'fetch', then within that specific Event instance, the reference self.fetch would retrieve the value of that field, instead of the fetch class method that Event inherits from DbRecord. This is a subtle bug, and it could easily sneak through testing and blow up only in production when the venue or speaker records linked to that specific Event record are retrieved.

Warning

When creating instance attribute names from data, there is always the risk of bugs due to shadowing of class attributes (such as methods) or data loss through accidental overwriting of existing instance attributes. This caveat is probably the main reason why, by default, Python dicts are not like JavaScript objects in the first place.

If the Record class behaved more like a mapping, implementing a dynamic __getitem__ instead of a dynamic __getattr__, there would be no risk of bugs from overwriting or shadowing. A custom mapping is probably the Pythonic way to implement Record. But if I took that road, we’d not be reflecting on the tricks and traps of dynamic attribute programming.

The final piece of this example is the revised load_db function in Example 19-14.

Example 19-14. schedule2.py: the load_db function

def load_db(db):
    raw_data = osconfeed.load()
    warnings.warn('loading ' + DB_NAME)
    for collection, rec_list in raw_data['Schedule'].items():
        record_type = collection[:-1]
        cls_name = record_type.capitalize()
        cls = globals().get(cls_name, DbRecord)
        if inspect.isclass(cls) and issubclass(cls, DbRecord):
            factory = cls
        else:
            factory = DbRecord
        for record in rec_list:
            key = '{}.{}'.format(record_type, record['serial'])
            record['serial'] = key
            db[key] = factory(**record)

So far, no changes from the load_db in schedule1.py (Example 19-9).

Capitalize the record_type to get a potential class name (e.g., 'event' becomes 'Event').

Get an object by that name from the module global scope; get DbRecord if there’s no such object.

If the object just retrieved is a class, and is a subclass of DbRecord…

…bind the factory name to it. This means factory may be any subclass of DbRecord, depending on the record_type.

Otherwise, bind the factory name to DbRecord.

The for loop that creates the key and saves the records is the same as before, except that…

…the object stored in the database is constructed by factory, which may be DbRecord or a subclass selected according to the record_type.

Note that the only record_type that has a custom class is Event, but if classes named Speaker or Venue are coded, load_db will automatically use those classes when building and saving records, instead of the default DbRecord class.

So far, the examples in this chapter were designed to show a variety of techniques for implementing dynamic attributes using basic tools such as __getattr__, hasattr, getattr, @property, and __dict__.

Properties are frequently used to enforce business rules by changing a public attribute into an attribute managed by a getter and setter without affecting client code, as the next section shows.

Using a Property for Attribute Validation

So far, we have only seen the @property decorator used to implement read-only properties. In this section, we will create a read/write property.

LineItem Take #1: Class for an Item in an Order

Imagine an app for a store that sells organic food in bulk, where customers can order nuts, dried fruit, or cereals by weight. In that system, each order would hold a sequence of line items, and each line item could be represented by a class as in Example 19-15.

Example 19-15. bulkfood_v1.py: the simplest LineItem class

class LineItem:

    def __init__(self, description, weight, price):
        self.description = description
        self.weight = weight
        self.price = price

    def subtotal(self):
        return self.weight * self.price

That’s nice and simple. Perhaps too simple. Example 19-16 shows a problem.

Example 19-16. A negative weight results in a negative subtotal

    >>> raisins = LineItem('Golden raisins', 10, 6.95)
    >>> raisins.subtotal()
    69.5
    >>> raisins.weight = -20  # garbage in...
    >>> raisins.subtotal()    # garbage out...
    -139.0

This is a toy example, but not as fanciful as you may think. Here is a true story from the early days of Amazon.com:

We found that customers could order a negative quantity of books! And we would credit their credit card with the price and, I assume, wait around for them to ship the books.¹³

Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com

How do we fix this? We could change the interface of LineItem to use a getter and a setter for the weight attribute. That would be the Java way, and it’s not wrong.

On the other hand, it’s natural to be able set the weight of an item by just assigning to it; and perhaps the system is in production with other parts already accessing item.weight directly. In this case, the Python way would be to replace the data attribute with a property.

LineItem Take #2: A Validating Property

Implementing a property will allow us to use a getter and a setter, but the interface of LineItem will not change (i.e., setting the weight of a LineItem will still be written as raisins.weight = 12).

Example 19-17 lists the code for a read/write weight property.

Example 19-17. bulkfood_v2.py: a LineItem with a weight property

class LineItem:

    def __init__(self, description, weight, price):
        self.description = description
        self.weight = weight
        self.price = price

    def subtotal(self):
        return self.weight * self.price

    @property
    def weight(self):
        return self.__weight

    @weight.setter
    def weight(self, value):
        if value > 0:
            self.__weight = value
        else:
            raise ValueError('value must be > 0')

Here the property setter is already in use, making sure that no instances with negative weight can be created.

@property decorates the getter method.

The methods that implement a property all have the name of the public attribute: weight.

The actual value is stored in a private attribute __weight.

The decorated getter has a .setter attribute, which is also a decorator; this ties the getter and setter together.

If the value is greater than zero, we set the private __weight.

Otherwise, ValueError is raised.

Note how a LineItem with an invalid weight cannot be created now:

>>> walnuts = LineItem('walnuts', 0, 10.00)
Traceback (most recent call last):
    ...
ValueError: value must be > 0

Now we have protected weight from users providing negative values. Although buyers usually can’t set the price of an item, a clerical error or a bug may create a LineItem with a negative price. To prevent that, we could also turn price into a property, but this would entail some repetition in our code.

Remember the Paul Graham quote from Chapter 14: “When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble.” The cure for repetition is abstraction. There are two ways to abstract away property definitions: using a property factory or a descriptor class. The descriptor class approach is more flexible, and we’ll devote Chapter 20 to a full discussion of it. Properties are in fact implemented as descriptor classes themselves. But here we will continue our exploration of properties by implementing a property factory as a function.

But before we can implement a property factory, we need to have a deeper understanding of properties.

A Proper Look at Properties

Although often used as a decorator, the property built-in is actually a class. In Python, functions and classes are often interchangeable, because both are callable and there is no new operator for object instantiation, so invoking a constructor is no different than invoking a factory function. And both can be used as decorators, as long as they return a new callable that is a suitable replacement of the decorated function.

This is the full signature of the property constructor:

property(fget=None, fset=None, fdel=None, doc=None)

All arguments are optional, and if a function is not provided for one of them, the corresponding operation is not allowed by the resulting property object.

The property type was added in Python 2.2, but the @ decorator syntax appeared only in Python 2.4, so for a few years, properties were defined by passing the accessor functions as the first two arguments.

The “classic” syntax for defining properties without decorators is illustrated in Example 19-18.

Example 19-18. bulkfood_v2b.py: same as Example 19-17 but without using decorators

class LineItem:

    def __init__(self, description, weight, price):
        self.description = description
        self.weight = weight
        self.price = price

    def subtotal(self):
        return self.weight * self.price

    def get_weight(self):
        return self.__weight

    def set_weight(self, value):
        if value > 0:
            self.__weight = value
        else:
            raise ValueError('value must be > 0')

    weight = property(get_weight, set_weight)

A plain getter.

A plain setter.

Build the property and assign it to a public class attribute.

The classic form is better than the decorator syntax in some situations; the code of the property factory we’ll discuss shortly is one example. On the other hand, in a class body with many methods, the decorators make it explicit which are the getters and setters, without depending on the convention of using get and set prefixes in their names.

The presence of a property in a class affects how attributes in instances of that class can be found in a way that may be surprising at first. The next section explains.

Properties Override Instance Attributes

Properties are always class attributes, but they actually manage attribute access in the instances of the class.

In “Overriding Class Attributes” we saw that when an instance and its class both have a data attribute by the same name, the instance attribute overrides, or shadows, the class attribute—at least when read through that instance. Example 19-19 illustrates this point.

Example 19-19. Instance attribute shadows class data attribute

>>> class Class:
...     data = 'the class data attr'
...     @property
...     def prop(self):
...         return 'the prop value'
...
>>> obj = Class()
>>> vars(obj)
{}
>>> obj.data
'the class data attr'
>>> obj.data = 'bar'
>>> vars(obj)
{'data': 'bar'}
>>> obj.data
'bar'
>>> Class.data
'the class data attr'

Define Class with two class attributes: the data data attribute and the prop property.

vars returns the __dict__ of obj, showing it has no instance attributes.

Reading from obj.data retrieves the value of Class.data.

Writing to obj.data creates an instance attribute.

Inspect the instance to see the instance attribute.

Now reading from obj.data retrieves the value of the instance attribute. When read from the obj instance, the instance data shadows the class data.

The Class.data attribute is intact.

Now, let’s try to override the prop attribute on the obj instance. Resuming the previous console session, we have Example 19-20.

Example 19-20. Instance attribute does not shadow class property (continued from Example 19-19)

>>> Class.prop
<property object at 0x1072b7408>
>>> obj.prop
'the prop value'
>>> obj.prop = 'foo'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
AttributeError: can't set attribute
>>> obj.__dict__['prop'] = 'foo'
>>> vars(obj)
{'data': 'bar', 'prop': 'foo'}
>>> obj.prop
'the prop value'
>>> Class.prop = 'baz'
>>> obj.prop
'foo'

Reading prop directly from Class retrieves the property object itself, without running its getter method.

Reading obj.prop executes the property getter.

Trying to set an instance prop attribute fails.

Putting 'prop' directly in the obj.__dict__ works.

We can see that obj now has two instance attributes: data and prop.

However, reading obj.prop still runs the property getter. The property is not shadowed by an instance attribute.

Overwriting Class.prop destroys the property object.

Now obj.prop retrieves the instance attribute. Class.prop is not a property anymore, so it no longer overrides obj.prop.

As a final demonstration, we’ll add a new property to Class, and see it overriding an instance attribute. Example 19-21 picks up where Example 19-20 left off.

Example 19-21. New class property shadows existing instance attribute (continued from Example 19-20)

>>> obj.data
'bar'
>>> Class.data
'the class data attr'
>>> Class.data = property(lambda self: 'the "data" prop value')
>>> obj.data
'the "data" prop value'
>>> del Class.data
>>> obj.data
'bar'

obj.data retrieves the instance data attribute.

Class.data retrieves the class data attribute.

Overwrite Class.data with a new property.

obj.data is now shadowed by the Class.data property.

Delete the property.

obj.data now reads the instance data attribute again.

The main point of this section is that an expression like obj.attr does not search for attr starting with obj. The search actually starts at obj.__class__, and only if there is no property named attr in the class, Python looks in the obj instance itself. This rule applies not only to properties but to a whole category of descriptors, the overriding descriptors. Further treatment of descriptors must wait for Chapter 20, where we’ll see that properties are in fact overriding descriptors.

Now back to properties. Every Python code unit—modules, functions, classes, methods—can have a docstring. The next topic is how to attach documentation to properties.

Property Documentation

When tools such as the console help() function or IDEs need to display the documentation of a property, they extract the information from the __doc__ attribute of the property.

If used with the classic call syntax, property can get the documentation string as the doc argument:

    weight = property(get_weight, set_weight, doc='weight in kilograms')

When property is deployed as a decorator, the docstring of the getter method—the one with the @property decorator itself—is used as the documentation of the property as a whole. Figure 19-2 shows the help screens generated from the code in Example 19-22.

Figure 19-2. Screenshots of the Python console when issuing the commands help(Foo.bar) and help(Foo). Source code in Example 19-22.

Example 19-22. Documentation for a property

class Foo:

    @property
    def bar(self):
        '''The bar attribute'''
        return self.__dict__['bar']

    @bar.setter
    def bar(self, value):
        self.__dict__['bar'] = value

Now that we have these property essentials covered, let’s go back to the issue of protecting both the weight and price attributes of LineItem so they only accept values greater than zero—but without implementing two nearly identical pairs of getters/setters by hand.

Coding a Property Factory

We’ll create a quantity property factory—so named because the managed attributes represent quantities that can’t be negative or zero in the application. Example 19-23 shows the clean look of the LineItem class using two instances of quantity properties: one for managing the weight attribute, the other for price.

Example 19-23. bulkfood_v2prop.py: the quantity property factory in use

class LineItem:
    weight = quantity('weight')
    price = quantity('price')

    def __init__(self, description, weight, price):
        self.description = description
        self.weight = weight
        self.price = price

    def subtotal(self):
        return self.weight * self.price

Use the factory to define the first custom property, weight, as a class attribute.

This second call builds another custom property, price.

Here the property is already active, making sure a negative or 0 weight is rejected.

The properties are also in use here, retrieving the values stored in the instance.

Recall that properties are class attributes. When building each quantity property, we need to pass the name of the LineItem attribute that will be managed by that specific property. Having to type the word weight twice in this line is unfortunate:

    weight = quantity('weight')

But avoiding that repetition is complicated because the property has no way of knowing which class attribute name will be bound to it. Remember: the right side of an assignment is evaluated first, so when quantity() is invoked, the weight class attribute doesn’t even exist.

Note

Improving the quantity property so that the user doesn’t need to retype the attribute name is a nontrivial metaprogramming problem. We’ll see a workaround in Chapter 20, but real solutions will have to wait until Chapter 21, because they require either a class decorator or a metaclass.

Example 19-24 lists the implementation of the quantity property factory.¹⁴

Example 19-24. bulkfood_v2prop.py: the quantity property factory

def quantity(storage_name):

    def qty_getter(instance):
        return instance.__dict__[storage_name]

    def qty_setter(instance, value):
        if value > 0:
            instance.__dict__[storage_name] = value
        else:
            raise ValueError('value must be > 0')

    return property(qty_getter, qty_setter)

The storage_name argument determines where the data for each property is stored; for the weight, the storage name will be 'weight'.

The first argument of the qty_getter could be named self, but that would be strange because this is not a class body; instance refers to the LineItem instance where the attribute will be stored.

qty_getter references storage_name, so it will be preserved in the closure of this function; the value is retrieved directly from the instance.__dict__ to bypass the property and avoid an infinite recursion.

qty_setter is defined, also taking instance as first argument.

The value is stored directly in the instance.__dict__, again bypassing the property.

Build a custom property object and return it.

The bits of Example 19-24 that deserve careful study revolve around the storage_name variable. When you code each property in the traditional way, the name of the attribute where you will store a value is hardcoded in the getter and setter methods. But here, the qty_getter and qty_setter functions are generic, and they depend on the storage_name variable to know where to get/set the managed attribute in the instance __dict__. Each time the quantity factory is called to build a property, the storage_name must be set to a unique value.

The functions qty_getter and qty_setter will be wrapped by the property object created in the last line of the factory function. Later when called to perform their duties, these functions will read the storage_name from their closures, to determine where to retrieve/store the managed attribute values.

In Example 19-25, I create and inspect a LineItem instance, exposing the storage attributes.

Example 19-25. bulkfood_v2prop.py: the quantity property factory

    >>> nutmeg = LineItem('Moluccan nutmeg', 8, 13.95)
    >>> nutmeg.weight, nutmeg.price
    (8, 13.95)
    >>> sorted(vars(nutmeg).items())
    [('description', 'Moluccan nutmeg'), ('price', 13.95), ('weight', 8)]

Reading the weight and price through the properties shadowing the namesake instance attributes.

Using vars to inspect the nutmeg instance: here we see the actual instance attributes used to store the values.

Note how the properties built by our factory leverage the behavior described in “Properties Override Instance Attributes”: the weight property overrides the weight instance attribute so that every reference to self.weight or nutmeg.weight is handled by the property functions, and the only way to bypass the property logic is to access the instance __dict__ directly.

The code in Example 19-25 may be a bit tricky, but it’s concise: it’s identical in length to the decorated getter/setter pair defining just the weight property in Example 19-17. The LineItem definition in Example 19-23 looks much better without the noise of the getter/setters.

In a real system, that same kind of validation may appear in many fields, across several classes, and the quantity factory would be placed in a utility module to be used over and over again. Eventually that simple factory could be refactored into a more extensible descriptor class, with specialized subclasses performing different validations. We’ll do that in Chapter 20.

Now let us wrap up the discussion of properties with the issue of attribute deletion.

Handling Attribute Deletion

Recall from the Python tutorial that object attributes can be deleted using the del statement:

del my_object.an_attribute

In practice, deleting attributes is not something we do every day in Python, and the requirement to handle it with a property is even more unusual. But it is supported, and I can think of a silly example to demonstrate it.

In a property definition, the @my_propety.deleter decorator is used to wrap the method in charge of deleting the attribute managed by the property. As promised, Example 19-26 is a silly example showing how to code a property deleter.

Example 19-26. blackknight.py: inspired by the Black Knight character of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”

class BlackKnight:

    def __init__(self):
        self.members = ['an arm', 'another arm',
                        'a leg', 'another leg']
        self.phrases = ["'Tis but a scratch.",
                        "It's just a flesh wound.",
                        "I'm invincible!",
                        "All right, we'll call it a draw."]

    @property
    def member(self):
        print('next member is:')
        return self.members[0]

    @member.deleter
    def member(self):
        text = 'BLACK KNIGHT (loses {})\n-- {}'
        print(text.format(self.members.pop(0), self.phrases.pop(0)))

The doctests in blackknight.py are in Example 19-27.

Example 19-27. blackknight.py: doctests for Example 19-26 (the Black Knight never concedes defeat)

    >>> knight = BlackKnight()
    >>> knight.member
    next member is:
    'an arm'
    >>> del knight.member
    BLACK KNIGHT (loses an arm)
    -- 'Tis but a scratch.
    >>> del knight.member
    BLACK KNIGHT (loses another arm)
    -- It's just a flesh wound.
    >>> del knight.member
    BLACK KNIGHT (loses a leg)
    -- I'm invincible!
    >>> del knight.member
    BLACK KNIGHT (loses another leg)
    -- All right, we'll call it a draw.

Using the classic call syntax instead of decorators, the fdel argument is used to set the deleter function. For example, the member property would be coded like this in the body of the BlackKnight class:

    member = property(member_getter, fdel=member_deleter)

If you are not using a property, attribute deletion can also be handled by implementing the lower-level __delattr__ special method, presented in “Special Methods for Attribute Handling”. Coding a silly class with __delattr__ is left as an exercise to the procrastinating reader.

Properties are a powerful feature, but sometimes simpler or lower-level alternatives are preferable. In the final section of this chapter, we’ll review some of the core APIs that Python offers for dynamic attribute programming.

Essential Attributes and Functions for Attribute Handling

Throughout this chapter, and even before in the book, we’ve used some of the built-in functions and special methods Python provides for dealing with dynamic attributes. This section gives an overview of them in one place, because their documentation is scattered in the official docs.

Special Attributes that Affect Attribute Handling

The behavior of many of the functions and special methods listed in the following sections depend on three special attributes:

__class__

A reference to the object’s class (i.e., obj.__class__ is the same as type(obj)). Python looks for special methods such as __getattr__ only in an object’s class, and not in the instances themselves.

__dict__

A mapping that stores the writable attributes of an object or class. An object that has a __dict__ can have arbitrary new attributes set at any time. If a class has a __slots__ attribute, then its instances may not have a __dict__. See __slots__ (next).

__slots__

An attribute that may be defined in a class to limit the attributes its instances can have. __slots__ is a tuple of strings naming the allowed attributes.¹⁵ If the '__dict__' name is not in __slots__, then the instances of that class will not have a __dict__ of their own, and only the named attributes will be allowed in them.

Built-In Functions for Attribute Handling

These five built-in functions perform object attribute reading, writing, and introspection:

dir([object])

Lists most attributes of the object. The official docs say dir is intended for interactive use so it does not provide a comprehensive list of attributes, but an “interesting” set of names. dir can inspect objects implemented with or without a __dict__. The __dict__ attribute itself is not listed by dir, but the __dict__ keys are listed. Several special attributes of classes, such as __mro__, __bases__, and __name__ are not listed by dir either. If the optional object argument is not given, dir lists the names in the current scope.

getattr(object, name[, default])

Gets the attribute identified by the name string from the object. This may fetch an attribute from the object’s class or from a superclass. If no such attribute exists, getattr raises AttributeError or returns the default value, if given.

hasattr(object, name)

Returns True if the named attribute exists in the object, or can be somehow fetched through it (by inheritance, for example). The documentation explains: “This is implemented by calling getattr(object, name) and seeing whether it raises an AttributeError or not.”

setattr(object, name, value)

Assigns the value to the named attribute of object, if the object allows it. This may create a new attribute or overwrite an existing one.

vars([object])

Returns the __dict__ of object; vars can’t deal with instances of classes that define __slots__ and don’t have a __dict__ (contrast with dir, which handles such instances). Without an argument, vars() does the same as locals(): returns a dict representing the local scope.

Special Methods for Attribute Handling

When implemented in a user-defined class, the special methods listed here handle attribute retrieval, setting, deletion, and listing.

Attribute access using either dot notation or the built-in functions getattr, hasattr, and setattr trigger the appropriate special methods listed here. Reading and writing attributes directly in the instance __dict__ does not trigger these special methods—and that’s the usual way to bypass them if needed.

“Section 3.3.9. Special method lookup” of the “Data model” chapter warns:

For custom classes, implicit invocations of special methods are only guaranteed to work correctly if defined on an object’s type, not in the object’s instance dictionary.

In other words, assume that the special methods will be retrieved on the class itself, even when the target of the action is an instance. For this reason, special methods are not shadowed by instance attributes with the same name.

In the following examples, assume there is a class named Class, obj is an instance of Class, and attr is an attribute of obj.

For every one of these special methods, it doesn’t matter if the attribute access is done using dot notation or one of the built-in functions listed in “Built-In Functions for Attribute Handling”. For example, both obj.attr and getattr(obj, 'attr', 42) trigger Class.__getattribute__(obj, 'attr').

__delattr__(self, name)

Always called when there is an attempt to delete an attribute using the del statement; e.g., del obj.attr triggers Class.__delattr__(obj, 'attr').

__dir__(self)

Called when dir is invoked on the object, to provide a listing of attributes; e.g., dir(obj) triggers Class.__dir__(obj).

__getattr__(self, name)

Called only when an attempt to retrieve the named attribute fails, after the obj, Class, and its superclasses are searched. The expressions obj.no_such_attr, getattr(obj, 'no_such_attr'), and hasattr(obj, 'no_such_attr') may trigger Class.__getattr__(obj, 'no_such_attr'), but only if an attribute by that name cannot be found in obj or in Class and its superclasses.

__getattribute__(self, name)

Always called when there is an attempt to retrieve the named attribute, except when the attribute sought is a special attribute or method. Dot notation and the getattr and hasattr built-ins trigger this method. __getattr__ is only invoked after __getattribute__, and only when __getattribute__ raises AttributeError. To retrieve attributes of the instance obj without triggering an infinite recursion, implementations of __getattribute__ should use super().__getattribute__(obj, name).

__setattr__(self, name, value)

Always called when there is an attempt to set the named attribute. Dot notation and the setattr built-in trigger this method; e.g., both obj.attr = 42 and setattr(obj, 'attr', 42) trigger Class.__setattr__(obj, 'attr', 42).

Tip

In practice, because they are unconditionally called and affect practically every attribute access, the __getattribute__ and __setattr__ special methods are harder to use correctly than __getattr__—which only handles nonexisting attribute names. Using properties or descriptors is less error prone than defining these special methods.

This concludes our dive into properties, special methods, and other techniques for coding dynamic attributes.

Chapter Summary

We started our coverage of dynamic attributes by showing practical examples of simple classes to make it easier to deal with a JSON data feed. The first example was the FrozenJSON class that converted nested dicts and lists into nested FrozenJSON instances and lists of them. The FrozenJSON code demonstrated the use of the __getattr__ special method to convert data structures on the fly, whenever their attributes were read. The last version of FrozenJSON showcased the use of the __new__ constructor method to transform a class into a flexible factory of objects, not limited to instances of itself.

We then converted the JSON feed to a shelve.Shelf database storing serialized instances of a Record class. The first rendition of Record was a few lines long and introduced the “bunch” idiom: using self.__dict__.update(**kwargs) to build arbitrary attributes from keyword arguments passed to __init__. The second iteration of this example saw the extension of Record with a DbRecord class for database integration and an Event class implementing automatic retrieval of linked records through properties.

Coverage of properties continued with the LineItem class, where a property was deployed to protect a weight attribute from negative or zero values that make no business sense. After a deeper look at property syntax and semantics, we created a property factory to enforce the same validation on weight and price, without coding multiple getters and setters. The property factory leveraged subtle concepts—such as closures and the instance attribute overriding by properties—to provide an elegant generic solution using the same number of lines as a single handcoded property definition.

Finally, we had a brief look at handling attribute deletion with properties, followed by an overview of the key special attributes, built-in functions, and special methods that support attribute metaprogramming in the core Python language.

Further Reading

The official documentation for the attribute handling and introspection built-in functions is Chapter 2, “Built-in Functions” of The Python Standard Library. The related special methods and the __slots__ special attribute are documented in The Python Language Reference in “3.3.2. Customizing attribute access”. The semantics of how special methods are invoked bypassing instances is explained in “3.3.9. Special method lookup”. In Chapter 4, “Built-in Types,” of the Python Standard Library, “4.13. Special Attributes” covers __class__ and __dict__ attributes.

Python Cookbook, 3E by David Beazley and Brian K. Jones (O’Reilly) has several recipes covering the topics of this chapter, but I will highlight three that are outstanding: “Recipe 8.8. Extending a Property in a Subclass” addresses the thorny issue of overriding the methods inside a property inherited from a superclass; “Recipe 8.15. Delegating Attribute Access” implements a proxy class showcasing most special methods from “Special Methods for Attribute Handling” in this book; and the awesome “Recipe 9.21. Avoiding Repetitive Property Methods,” which was the basis for the property factory function presented in Example 19-24.

Python in a Nutshell, 2E (O’Reilly), by Alex Martelli, covers only Python 2.5 but the fundamentals still apply to Python 3 and his treatment is rigorous and objective. Martelli devotes only three pages to properties, but that’s because the book follows an axiomatic presentation style: the previous 15 pages or so provide a thorough description of the semantics of Python classes from the ground up, including descriptors, which are how properties are actually implemented under the hood. So by the time he gets to properties, he can pack a lot of insights in those three pages—including that which I selected to open this chapter.

Bertrand Meyer, quoted in the Uniform Access Principle definition in this chapter opening, wrote the excellent Object-Oriented Software Construction, 2E (Prentice-Hall). The book is more than 1,250 pages long, and I confess I did not read it all, but the first six chapters provide one of the best conceptual introductions to OO analysis and design I’ve seen, Chapter 11 introduces Design by Contract (Meyer invented the method and coined the term), and Chapter 35 offers his assessments of some key OO languages: Simula, Smalltalk, CLOS (the Lisp OO extension), Objective-C, C++, and Java, with brief comments on some others. Meyer is also the inventor of the pseudo-pseudocode: only in the last page of the book he reveals that the “notation” he uses throughout as pseudocode is in fact Eiffel.

Soapbox

Meyer’s Uniform Access Principle (sometimes called UAP by acronym-lovers) is aesthetically appealing. As a programmer using an API, I shouldn’t have to care whether coconut.price simply fetches a data attribute or performs a computation. As a consumer and a citizen, I do care: in ecommerce today the value of coconut.price often depends on who is asking, so it’s certainly not a mere data attribute. In fact, it’s common practice that the price is lower if the query comes from outside the store—say, from a price-comparison engine. This effectively punishes loyal customers who like to browse within a particular store. But I digress.

The previous digression does raise a relevant point for programming: although the Uniform Access Principle makes perfect sense in an ideal world, in reality users of an API may need to know whether reading coconut.price is potentially too expensive or time consuming. As usual in matters of software engineering, Ward Cunningham’s original Wiki hosts insightful arguments about the merits of the Uniform Access Principle.

In object-oriented programming languages, application or violations of the Uniform Access Principle usually revolve around the syntax of reading public data attributes versus invoking getter/setter methods.

Smalltalk and Ruby address this issue in a simple and elegant way: they don’t support public data attributes at all. Every instance attribute in these languages is private, so every access to them must be through methods. But their syntax makes this painless: in Ruby, coconut.price invokes the price getter; in Smalltalk, it’s simply coconut price.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Java language allows the programmer to choose among four access level modifiers.¹⁶

The general practice does not agree with the syntax established by the Java designers, though. Everybody in Java-land agrees that attributes should be private, and you must spell it out every time, because it’s not the default. When all attributes are private, all access to them from outside the class must go through accessors. Java IDEs include shortcuts for generating accessor methods automatically. Unfortunately, the IDE is not so helpful when you must read the code six months later. It’s up to you to wade through a sea of do-nothing accessors to find those that add value by implementing some business logic.

Alex Martelli speaks for the majority of the Python community when he calls accessors “goofy idioms” and then provides these examples that look very different but do the same thing:¹⁷

someInstance.widgetCounter += 1
# rather than...
someInstance.setWidgetCounter(someInstance.getWidgetCounter() + 1)

Sometimes when designing APIs, I’ve wondered whether every method that does not take an argument (besides self), returns a value (other than None), and is a pure function (i.e., has no side effects) should be replaced by a read-only property. In this chapter, the LineItem.subtotal method (as in Example 19-23) would be a good candidate to become a read-only property. Of course, this excludes methods that are designed to change the object, such as my_list.clear(). It would be a terrible idea to turn that into a property, so that merely acessing my_list.clear would delete the contents of the list!

In the Pingo.io GPIO library (mentioned in “The __missing__ Method”), much of the user-level API is based on properties. For example, to read the current value of an analog pin, the user writes pin.value, and setting a digital pin mode is written as pin.mode = OUT. Behind the scenes, reading an analog pin value or setting a digital pin mode may involve a lot of code, depending on the specific board driver. We decided to use properties in Pingo because we want the API to be comfortable to use even in interactive environments like iPython Notebook, and we feel pin.mode = OUT is easier on the eyes and on the fingers than pin.set_mode(OUT).

Although I find the Smalltalk and Ruby solution cleaner, I think the Python approach makes more sense than the Java one. We are allowed to start simple, coding data members as public attributes, because we know they can always be wrapped by properties (or descriptors, which we’ll talk about in the next chapter).

__new__ Is Better Than new

Another example of the Uniform Access Principle (or a variation of it) is the fact that function calls and object instantiation use the same syntax in Python: my_obj = foo(), where foo may be a class or any other callable.

Other languages influenced by C++ syntax have a new operator that makes instantiation look different than a call. Most of the time, the user of an API doesn’t care whether foo is a function or a class. Until recently, I was under the impression that property was a function. In normal usage, it makes no difference.

There are many good reasons for replacing constructors with factories.¹⁸ A popular motive is limiting the number of instances, by returning previously built ones (as in the Singleton pattern). A related use is caching expensive object construction. Also, sometimes it’s convenient to return objects of different types depending on the arguments given.

Coding a constructor is simpler; providing a factory adds flexibility at the expense of more code. In languages that have a new operator, the designer of an API must decide in advance whether to stick with a simple constructor or invest in factory. If the initial choice is wrong, the correction may be costly—all because new is an operator.

Sometimes it may also be convenient to go the other way, and replace a simple function with a class.

In Python, classes and functions are interchangeable in many situations. Not only because there’s no new operator, but also because there is the __new__ special method, which can turn a class into a factory producing objects of different kinds (as we saw in “Flexible Object Creation with __new__”) or returning prebuilt instances instead of creating a new one every time.

This function-class duality would be easier to leverage if PEP 8 — Style Guide for Python Code did not recommend CamelCase for class names. On the other hand, dozens of classes in the standard library have lowercase names (e.g., property, str, defauldict, etc.). So maybe the use of lowercase class names is a feature, and not a bug. But however we look at it, the inconsistent capitalization of classes in the Python standard library poses a usability problem.

Although calling a function is not different than calling a class, it’s good to know which is which because of another thing we can do with a class: subclassing. So I personally use CamelCase in every class that I code, and I wish all classes in the Python standard library used the same convention. I am looking at you, collections.OrderedDict and collections.defaultdict.

¹ Alex Martelli, Python in a Nutshell, 2E (O’Reilly), p. 101.

² Bertrand Meyer, Object-Oriented Software Construction, 2E, p. 57.

³ You can read about this feed and rules for using it at “DIY: OSCON schedule”. The original 744KB JSON file is still online as I write this. A copy named osconfeed.json can be found in the oscon-schedule/data/ directory in the Fluent Python code repository.

⁴ An often mentioned one is AttrDict; another, allowing quick creation of nested mappings is addict.

⁵ This line is where a KeyError exception may occur, in the expression self.__data[name]. It should be handled and an AttributeError raised instead, because that’s what is expected from __getattr__. The diligent reader is invited to code the error handling as an exercise.

⁶ The source of the data is JSON, and the only collection types in JSON data are dict and list.

⁷ I could also do len(db), but that would be costly in a large dbm database.

⁸ A fundamental weakness of doctest is the lack of proper resource setup and guaranteed tear-down. I wrote most tests for schedule1.py using py.test, and you can see them at Example A-12.

⁹ By the way, Bunch is the name of the class used by Alex Martelli to share this tip in a recipe from 2001 titled “The simple but handy collector of a bunch of named stuff class”.

¹⁰ The StackOverflow topic “Class-level read only properties in Python” has solutions to read-only attributes in classes, including one by Alex Martelli. The solutions require metaclasses, so you may want to read Chapter 21 before studying them.

¹¹ The full listing for schedule2.py is in Example A-13, together with py.test scripts in “Chapter 19: OSCON Schedule Scripts and Tests”.

¹² Explicitly subclassing from object in Python 3 is not wrong, just redundant because all classes are new-style now. This is one example where breaking with the past made the language cleaner. If the same code must run in Python 2 and Python 3, inheriting from object should be explicit.

¹³ Direct quote by Jeff Bezos in the Wall Street Journal story “Birth of a Salesman” (October 15, 2011).

¹⁴ This code is adapted from “Recipe 9.21. Avoiding Repetitive Property Methods” from Python Cookbook, 3E by David Beazley and Brian K. Jones (O’Reilly).

¹⁵ Alex Martelli points out that, although __slots__ can be coded as a list, it’s better to be explicit and always use a tuple, because changing the list in the __slots__ after the class body is processed has no effect, so it would be misleading to use a mutable sequence there.

¹⁶ Including the no-name default that the Java Tutorial calls “package-private.”

¹⁷ Alex Martelli, Python in a Nutshell, 2E (O’Reilly), p. 101.

¹⁸ The reasons I am about to mention are given in the Dr. Dobbs Journal article titled “Java’s new Considered Harmful”, by Jonathan Amsterdam and in “Consider static factory methods instead of constructors”, which is Item 1 of the award-winning book Effective Java (Addison-Wesley) by Joshua Bloch.

Chapter 20. Attribute Descriptors

Learning about descriptors not only provides access to a larger toolset, it creates a deeper understanding of how Python works and an appreciation for the elegance of its design.¹

Raymond Hettinger, Python core developer and guru

Descriptors are a way of reusing the same access logic in multiple attributes. For example, field types in ORMs such as the Django ORM and SQL Alchemy are descriptors, managing the flow of data from the fields in a database record to Python object attributes and vice versa.

A descriptor is a class that implements a protocol consisting of the __get__, __set__, and __delete__ methods. The property class implements the full descriptor protocol. As usual with protocols, partial implementations are OK. In fact, most descriptors we see in real code implement only __get__ and __set__, and many implement only one of these methods.

Descriptors are a distinguishing feature of Python, deployed not only at the application level but also in the language infrastructure. Besides properties, other Python features that leverage descriptors are methods and the classmethod and staticmethod decorators. Understanding descriptors is key to Python mastery. This is what this chapter is about.

Descriptor Example: Attribute Validation

As we saw in “Coding a Property Factory”, a property factory is a way to avoid repetitive coding of getters and setters by applying functional programming patterns. A property factory is a higher-order function that creates a parameterized set of accessor functions and builds a custom property instance from them, with closures to hold settings like the storage_name. The object-oriented way of solving the same problem is a descriptor class.

We’ll continue the series of LineItem examples where we left it, in “Coding a Property Factory”, by refactoring the quantity property factory into a Quantity descriptor class.

LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor

A class implementing a __get__, a __set__, or a __delete__ method is a descriptor. You use a descriptor by declaring instances of it as class attributes of another class.

We’ll create a Quantity descriptor and the LineItem class will use two instances of Quantity: one for managing the weight attribute, the other for price. A diagram helps, so take a look at Figure 20-1.

Figure 20-1. UML class diagram for LineItem using a descriptor class named Quantity. Underlined attributes in UML are class attributes. Note that weight and price are instances of Quantity attached to the LineItem class, but LineItem instances also have their own weight and price attributes where those values are stored.

Note that the word weight appears twice in Figure 20-1, because there are really two distinct attributes named weight: one is a class attribute of LineItem, the other is an instance attribute that will exist in each LineItem object. This also applies to price.

From now on, I will use the following definitions:

Descriptor class

A class implementing the descriptor protocol. That’s Quantity in Figure 20-1.

Managed class

The class where the descriptor instances are declared as class attributes—LineItem in Figure 20-1.

Descriptor instance

Each instance of a descriptor class, declared as a class attribute of the managed class. In Figure 20-1, each descriptor instance is represented by a composition arrow with an underlined name (the underline means class attribute in UML). The black diamonds touch the LineItem class, which contains the descriptor instances.

Managed instance

One instance of the managed class. In this example, LineItem instances will be the managed instances (they are not shown in the class diagram).

Storage attribute

An attribute of the managed instance that will hold the value of a managed attribute for that particular instance. In Figure 20-1, the LineItem instance attributes weight and price will be the storage attributes. They are distinct from the descriptor instances, which are always class attributes.

Managed attribute

A public attribute in the managed class that will be handled by a descriptor instance, with values stored in storage attributes. In other words, a descriptor instance and a storage attribute provide the infrastructure for a managed attribute.

It’s important to realize that Quantity instances are class attributes of LineItem. This crucial point is highlighted by the mills and gizmos in Figure 20-2.

Figure 20-2. UML class diagram annotated with MGN (Mills & Gizmos Notation): classes are mills that produce gizmos—the instances. The Quantity mill produces two red gizmos, which are attached to the LineItem mill: weight and price. The LineItem mill produces blue gizmos that have their own weight and price attributes where those values are stored.

Introducing Mills & Gizmos Notation

After explaining descriptors many times, I realized UML is not very good at showing relationships involving classes and instances, like the relationship between a managed class and the descriptor instances.² So I invented my own “language,” the Mills & Gizmos Notation (MGN), which I use to annotate UML diagrams.

MGN is designed to make very clear the distinction between classes and instances. See Figure 20-3. In MGN, a class is drawn as a “mill,” a complicated machine that produces gizmos. Classes/mills are always machines with levers and dials. The gizmos are the instances, and they look much simpler. A gizmo is the same color as the mill that made it.

Figure 20-3. MGN sketch showing the LineItem class making three instances, and Quantity making two. One instance of Quantity is retrieving a value stored in a LineItem instance.

For this example, I drew LineItem instances as rows in a tabular invoice, with three cells representing the three attributes (description, weight, and price). Because Quantity instances are descriptors, they have a magnifying glass to __get__ values and a claw to __set__ values. When we get to metaclasses, you’ll thank me for these doodles.

Enough doodling for now. Here is the code: Example 20-1 shows the Quantity descriptor class and a new LineItem class using two instances of Quantity.

Example 20-1. bulkfood_v3.py: quantity descriptors manage attributes in LineItem

class Quantity:

    def __init__(self, storage_name):
        self.storage_name = storage_name

    def __set__(self, instance, value):
        if value > 0:
            instance.__dict__[self.storage_name] = value
        else:
            raise ValueError('value must be > 0')

class LineItem:
    weight = Quantity('weight')
    price = Quantity('price')

    def __init__(self, description, weight, price):
        self.description = description
        self.weight = weight
        self.price = price

    def subtotal(self):
        return self.weight * self.price

Descriptor is a protocol-based feature; no subclassing is needed to implement one.

Each Quantity instance will have a storage_name attribute: that’s the name of the attribute that will hold the value in the managed instances.

__set__ is called when there is an attempt to assign to the managed attribute. Here, self is the descriptor instance (i.e., LineItem.weight or LineItem.price), instance is the managed instance (a LineItem instance), and value is the value being assigned.

Here, we must handle the managed instance __dict__ directly; trying to use the setattr built-in would trigger the __set__ method again, leading to infinite recursion.

The first descriptor instance is bound to the weight attribute.

The second descriptor instance is bound to the price attribute.

The rest of the class body is as simple and clean as the original code in bulkfood_v1.py (Example 19-15).

In Example 20-1, each managed attribute has the same name as its storage attribute, and there is no special getter logic, so Quantity doesn’t need a __get__ method.

The code in Example 20-1 works as intended, preventing the sale of truffles for $0:³

>>> truffle = LineItem('White truffle', 100, 0)
Traceback (most recent call last):
    ...
ValueError: value must be > 0

Warning

When coding a __set__ method, you must keep in mind what the self and instance arguments mean: self is the descriptor instance, and instance is the managed instance. Descriptors managing instance attributes should store values in the managed instances. That’s why Python provides the instance argument to the descriptor methods.

It may be tempting, but wrong, to store the value of each managed attribute in the descriptor instance itself. In other words, in the __set__ method, instead of coding:

    instance.__dict__[self.storage_name] = value

the tempting but bad alternative would be:

    self.__dict__[self.storage_name] = value

To understand why this would be wrong, think about the meaning of the first two arguments to __set__: self and instance. Here, self is the descriptor instance, which is actually a class attribute of the managed class. You may have thousands of LineItem instances in memory at one time, but you’ll only have two instances of the descriptors: LineItem.weight and LineItem.price. So anything you store in the descriptor instances themselves is actually part of a LineItem class attribute, and therefore is shared among all LineItem instances.

A drawback of Example 20-1 is the need to repeat the names of the attributes when the descriptors are instantiated in the managed class body. It would be nice if the LineItem class could be declared like this:

class LineItem:
    weight = Quantity()
    price = Quantity()

    # remaining methods as before

The problem is that—as we saw in Chapter 8—the righthand side of an assignment is executed before the variable exists. The expression Quantity() is evaluated to create a descriptor instance, and at this time there is no way the code in the Quantity class can guess the name of the variable to which the descriptor will be bound (e.g., weight or price).

As it stands, Example 20-1 requires naming each Quantity explicitly, which is not only inconvenient but dangerous: if a programmer copy and pasting code forgets to edit both names and writes something like price = Quantity('weight'), the program will misbehave badly, clobbering the value of weight whenever the price is set.

A not-so-elegant but workable solution to the repeated name problem is presented next. Better solutions require either a class decorator or a metaclass, so I’ll leave them for Chapter 21.

LineItem Take #4: Automatic Storage Attribute Names

To avoid retyping the attribute name in the descriptor declarations, we’ll generate a unique string for the storage_name of each Quantity instance. Figure 20-4 shows the updated UML diagram for the Quantity and LineItem classes.

Figure 20-4. UML class diagram for Example 20-2. Now Quantity has both get and set methods, and LineItem instances have storage attributes with generated names: _Quantity#0 and _Quantity#1.

To generate the storage_name, we start with a '_Quantity#' prefix and concatenate an integer: the current value of a Quantity.__counter class attribute that we’ll increment every time a new Quantity descriptor instance is attached to a class. Using the hash character in the prefix guarantees the storage_name will not clash with attributes created by the user using dot notation, because nutmeg._Quantity#0 is not valid Python syntax. But we can always get and set attributes with such “invalid” identifiers using the getattr and setattr built-in functions, or by poking the instance __dict__. Example 20-2 shows the new implementation.

Example 20-2. bulkfood_v4.py: each Quantity descriptor gets a unique storage_name

class Quantity:
    __counter = 0

    def __init__(self):
        cls = self.__class__
        prefix = cls.__name__
        index = cls.__counter
        self.storage_name = '_{}#{}'.format(prefix, index)
        cls.__counter += 1

    def __get__(self, instance, owner):
        return getattr(instance, self.storage_name)

    def __set__(self, instance, value):
        if value > 0:
            setattr(instance, self.storage_name, value)
        else:
            raise ValueError('value must be > 0')

class LineItem:
    weight = Quantity()
    price = Quantity()

    def __init__(self, description, weight, price):
        self.description = description
        self.weight = weight
        self.price = price

    def subtotal(self):
        return self.weight * self.price

__counter is a class attribute of Quantity, counting the number of Quantity instances.

cls is a reference to the Quantity class.

The storage_name for each descriptor instance is unique because it’s built from the descriptor class name and the current __counter value (e.g., _Quantity#0).

Increment __counter.

We need to implement __get__ because the name of the managed attribute is not the same as the storage_name. The owner argument will be explained shortly.

Use the getattr built-in function to retrieve the value from the instance.

Use the setattr built-in to store the value in the instance.

Now we don’t need to pass the managed attribute name to the Quantity constructor. That was the goal for this version.

Here we can use the higher-level getattr and setattr built-ins to store the value—instead of resorting to instance.__dict__—because the managed attribute and the storage attribute have different names, so calling getattr on the storage attribute will not trigger the descriptor, avoiding the infinite recursion discussed in Example 20-1.

If you test bulkfood_v4.py, you can see that the weight and price descriptors work as expected, and the storage attributes can also be read directly, which is useful for debugging:

>>> from bulkfood_v4 import LineItem
>>> coconuts = LineItem('Brazilian coconut', 20, 17.95)
>>> coconuts.weight, coconuts.price
(20, 17.95)
>>> getattr(raisins, '_Quantity#0'), getattr(raisins, '_Quantity#1')
(20, 17.95)

Note

If we wanted to follow the convention Python uses to do name mangling (e.g., _LineItem__quantity0) we’d have to know the name of the managed class (i.e., LineItem), but the body of a class definition runs before the class itself is built by the interpreter, so we don’t have that information when each descriptor instance is created. However, in this case, there is no need to include the managed class name to avoid accidental overwriting in subclasses: the descriptor class __counter will be incremented every time a new descriptor is instantiated, guaranteeing that each storage name will be unique across all managed classes.

Note that __get__ receives three arguments: self, instance, and owner. The owner argument is a reference to the managed class (e.g., LineItem), and it’s handy when the descriptor is used to get attributes from the class. If a managed attribute, such as weight, is retrieved via the class like LineItem.weight, the descriptor __get__ method receives None as the value for the instance argument. This explains the Attribute error in the next console session:

>>> from bulkfood_v4 import LineItem
>>> LineItem.weight
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
  File ".../descriptors/bulkfood_v4.py", line 54, in __get__
    return getattr(instance, self.storage_name)
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute '_Quantity#0'

Raising AttributeError is an option when implementing __get__, but if you choose to do so, the message should be fixed to remove the confusing mention of NoneType and _Quantity#0, which are implementation details. A better message would be "'LineItem' class has no such attribute". Ideally, the name of the missing attribute should be spelled out, but the descriptor doesn’t know the name of the managed attribute in this example, so we can’t do better at this point.

On the other hand, to support introspection and other metaprogramming tricks by the user, it’s a good practice to make __get__ return the descriptor instance when the managed attribute is accessed through the class. Example 20-3 is a minor variation of Example 20-2, adding a bit of logic to Quantity.__get__.

Example 20-3. bulkfood_v4b.py (partial listing): when invoked through the managed class, get returns a reference to the descriptor itself

class Quantity:
    __counter = 0

    def __init__(self):
        cls = self.__class__
        prefix = cls.__name__
        index = cls.__counter
        self.storage_name = '_{}#{}'.format(prefix, index)
        cls.__counter += 1

    def __get__(self, instance, owner):
        if instance is None:
            return self
        else:
            return getattr(instance, self.storage_name)

    def __set__(self, instance, value):
        if value > 0:
            setattr(instance, self.storage_name, value)
        else:
            raise ValueError('value must be > 0')

If the call was not through an instance, return the descriptor itself.

Otherwise, return the managed attribute value, as usual.

Trying out Example 20-3, this is what we see:

>>> from bulkfood_v4b import LineItem
>>> LineItem.price
<bulkfood_v4b.Quantity object at 0x100721be0>
>>> br_nuts = LineItem('Brazil nuts', 10, 34.95)
>>> br_nuts.price
34.95

Looking at Example 20-2, you may think that’s a lot of code just for managing a couple of attributes, but it’s important to realize that the descriptor logic is now abstracted into a separate code unit: the Quantity class. Usually we do not define a descriptor in the same module where it’s used, but in a separate utility module designed to be used across the application—even in many applications, if you are developing a framework.

With this in mind, Example 20-4 better represents the typical usage of a descriptor.

Example 20-4. bulkfood_v4c.py: LineItem definition uncluttered; the Quantity descriptor class now resides in the imported model_v4c module

import model_v4c as model

class LineItem:
    weight = model.Quantity()
    price = model.Quantity()

    def __init__(self, description, weight, price):
        self.description = description
        self.weight = weight
        self.price = price

    def subtotal(self):
        return self.weight * self.price

Import the model_v4c module, giving it a friendlier name.

Put model.Quantity to use.

Django users will notice that Example 20-4 looks a lot like a model definition. It’s no coincidence: Django model fields are descriptors.

Note

As implemented so far, the Quantity descriptor works pretty well. Its only real drawback is the use of generated storage names like _Quantity#0, making debugging hard for the users. But automatically assigning storage names that resemble the managed attribute names requires a class decorator or a metaclass, topics we’ll defer to Chapter 21.

Because descriptors are defined in classes, we can leverage inheritance to reuse some of the code we have for new descriptors. That’s what we’ll do in the following section.

Property Factory Versus Descriptor Class

It’s not hard to reimplement the enhanced descriptor class of Example 20-2 by adding a few lines to the property factory shown in Example 19-24. The __counter variable presents a difficulty, but we can make it persist across invocations of the factory by defining it as an attribute of factory function object itself, as shown in Example 20-5.

Example 20-5. bulkfood_v4prop.py: same functionality as Example 20-2 with a property factory instead of a descriptor class

def quantity():
    try:
        quantity.counter += 1
    except AttributeError:
        quantity.counter = 0

    storage_name = '_{}:{}'.format('quantity', quantity.counter)

    def qty_getter(instance):
        return getattr(instance, storage_name)

    def qty_setter(instance, value):
        if value > 0:
            setattr(instance, storage_name, value)
        else:
            raise ValueError('value must be > 0')

    return property(qty_getter, qty_setter)

No storage_name argument.

We can’t rely on class attributes to share the counter across invocations, so we define it as an attribute of the quantity function itself.

If quantity.counter is undefined, set it to 0.

We also don’t have instance attributes, so we create storage_name as a local variable and rely on closures to keep them alive for later use by qty_getter and qty_setter.

The remaining code is identical to Example 19-24, except here we can use the getattr and setattr built-ins instead of fiddling with instance.__dict__.

So, which do you prefer? Example 20-2 or Example 20-5?

I prefer the descriptor class approach mainly for two reasons:

A descriptor class can be extended by subclassing; reusing code from a factory function without copying and pasting is much harder.

It’s more straightforward to hold state in class and instance attributes than in function attributes and closures as we had to do in Example 20-5.

On the other hand, when I explain Example 20-5, I don’t feel the urge to draw mills and gizmos. The property factory code does not depend on strange object relationships evidenced by descriptor methods having arguments named self and instance.

To summarize, the property factory pattern is simpler in some regards, but the descriptor class approach is more extensible. It’s also more widely used.

LineItem Take #5: A New Descriptor Type

The imaginary organic food store hits a snag: somehow a line item instance was created with a blank description and the order could not be fulfilled. To prevent that, we’ll create a new descriptor, NonBlank. As we design NonBlank, we realize it will be very much like the Quantity descriptor, except for the validation logic.

Reflecting on the functionality of Quantity, we note it does two different things: it takes care of the storage attributes in the managed instances, and it validates the value used to set those attributes. This prompts a refactoring, producing two base classes:

AutoStorage

Descriptor class that manages storage attributes automatically.

Validated

AutoStorage abstract subclass that overrides the __set__ method, calling a validate method that must be implemented by subclasses.

We’ll then rewrite Quantity and implement NonBlank by inheriting from Validated and just coding the validate methods. Figure 20-5 depicts the setup.

Figure 20-5. A hierarchy of descriptor classes. The AutoStorage base class manages the automatic storage of the attribute, Validated handles validation by delegating to an abstract validate method, Quantity and NonBlank are concrete subclasses of Validated.

The relationship between Validated, Quantity, and NonBlank is an application of the Template Method design pattern. In particular, the Validated.__set__ is a clear example of what the Gang of Four describe as a template method:

A template method defines an algorithm in terms of abstract operations that subclasses override to provide concrete behavior.⁴

In this case, the abstract operation is validation. Example 20-6 lists the implementation of the classes in Figure 20-5.

Example 20-6. model_v5.py: the refactored descriptor classes

import abc

class AutoStorage:
    __counter = 0

    def __init__(self):
        cls = self.__class__
        prefix = cls.__name__
        index = cls.__counter
        self.storage_name = '_{}#{}'.format(prefix, index)
        cls.__counter += 1

    def __get__(self, instance, owner):
        if instance is None:
            return self
        else:
            return getattr(instance, self.storage_name)

    def __set__(self, instance, value):
        setattr(instance, self.storage_name, value)

class Validated(abc.ABC, AutoStorage):

    def __set__(self, instance, value):
        value = self.validate(instance, value)
        super().__set__(instance, value)

    @abc.abstractmethod
    def validate(self, instance, value):
        """return validated value or raise ValueError"""

class Quantity(Validated):
    """a number greater than zero"""

    def validate(self, instance, value):
        if value <= 0:
            raise ValueError('value must be > 0')
        return value

class NonBlank(Validated):
    """a string with at least one non-space character"""

    def validate(self, instance, value):
        value = value.strip()
        if len(value) == 0:
            raise ValueError('value cannot be empty or blank')
        return value

AutoStorage provides most of the functionality of the former Quantity descriptor…

…except validation.

Validated is abstract but also inherits from AutoStorage.

__set__ delegates validation to a validate method…

…then uses the returned value to invoke __set__ on a superclass, which performs the actual storage.

In this class, validate is an abstract method.

Quantity and NonBlank inherit from Validated.

Requiring the concrete validate methods to return the validated value gives them an opportunity to clean up, convert, or normalize the data received. In this case, the value is returned stripped of leading and trailing blanks.

Users of model_v5.py don’t need to know all these details. What matters is that they get to use Quantity and NonBlank to automate the validation of instance attributes. See the latest LineItem class in Example 20-7.

Example 20-7. bulkfood_v5.py: LineItem using Quantity and NonBlank descriptors

import model_v5 as model

class LineItem:
    description = model.NonBlank()
    weight = model.Quantity()
    price = model.Quantity()

    def __init__(self, description, weight, price):
        self.description = description
        self.weight = weight
        self.price = price

    def subtotal(self):
        return self.weight * self.price

Import the model_v5 module, giving it a friendlier name.

Put model.NonBlank to use. The rest of the code is unchanged.

The LineItem examples we’ve seen in this chapter demonstrate a typical use of descriptors to manage data attributes. Such a descriptor is also called an overriding descriptor because its __set__ method overrides (i.e., interrupts and overrules) the setting of an attribute by the same name in the managed instance. However, there are also non-overriding descriptors. We’ll explore this distinction in detail in the next section.

Overriding Versus Nonoverriding Descriptors

Recall that there is an important asymmetry in the way Python handles attributes. Reading an attribute through an instance normally returns the attribute defined in the instance, but if there is no such attribute in the instance, a class attribute will be retrieved. On the other hand, assigning to an attribute in an instance normally creates the attribute in the instance, without affecting the class at all.

This asymmetry also affects descriptors, in effect creating two broad categories of descriptors depending on whether the __set__ method is defined. Observing the different behaviors requires a few classes, so we are going to use the code in Example 20-8 as our testbed for the following sections.

Note

Every __get__ and __set__ method in Example 20-8 calls print_args so their invocations are displayed in a readable way. Understanding print_args and the auxiliary functions cls_name and display is not important, so don’t get distracted by them.

Example 20-8. descriptorkinds.py: simple classes for studying descriptor overriding behaviors

### auxiliary functions for display only ###

def cls_name(obj_or_cls):
    cls = type(obj_or_cls)
    if cls is type:
        cls = obj_or_cls
    return cls.__name__.split('.')[-1]

def display(obj):
    cls = type(obj)
    if cls is type:
        return '<class {}>'.format(obj.__name__)
    elif cls in [type(None), int]:
        return repr(obj)
    else:
        return '<{} object>'.format(cls_name(obj))

def print_args(name, *args):
    pseudo_args = ', '.join(display(x) for x in args)
    print('-> {}.__{}__({})'.format(cls_name(args[0]), name, pseudo_args))

### essential classes for this example ###

class Overriding:
    """a.k.a. data descriptor or enforced descriptor"""

    def __get__(self, instance, owner):
        print_args('get', self, instance, owner)

    def __set__(self, instance, value):
        print_args('set', self, instance, value)

class OverridingNoGet:
    """an overriding descriptor without ``__get__``"""

    def __set__(self, instance, value):
        print_args('set', self, instance, value)

class NonOverriding:
    """a.k.a. non-data or shadowable descriptor"""

    def __get__(self, instance, owner):
        print_args('get', self, instance, owner)

class Managed:
    over = Overriding()
    over_no_get = OverridingNoGet()
    non_over = NonOverriding()

    def spam(self):
        print('-> Managed.spam({})'.format(display(self)))

A typical overriding descriptor class with __get__ and __set__.

The print_args function is called by every descriptor method in this example.

An overriding descriptor without a __get__ method.

No __set__ method here, so this is a nonoverriding descriptor.

The managed class, using one instance of each of the descriptor classes.

The spam method is here for comparison, because methods are also descriptors.

In the following sections, we will examine the behavior of attribute reads and writes on the Managed class and one instance of it, going through each of the different descriptors defined.

Overriding Descriptor

A descriptor that implements the __set__ method is called an overriding descriptor, because although it is a class attribute, a descriptor implementing __set__ will override attempts to assign to instance attributes. This is how Example 20-2 was implemented. Properties are also overriding descriptors: if you don’t provide a setter function, the default __set__ from the property class will raise AttributeError to signal that the attribute is read-only. Given the code in Example 20-8, experiments with an overriding descriptor can be seen in Example 20-9.

Example 20-9. Behavior of an overriding descriptor: obj.over is an instance of Overriding (Example 20-8)

    >>> obj = Managed()
    >>> obj.over
    -> Overriding.__get__(<Overriding object>, <Managed object>,
        <class Managed>)
    >>> Managed.over
    -> Overriding.__get__(<Overriding object>, None, <class Managed>)
    >>> obj.over = 7
    -> Overriding.__set__(<Overriding object>, <Managed object>, 7)
    >>> obj.over
    -> Overriding.__get__(<Overriding object>, <Managed object>,
        <class Managed>)
    >>> obj.__dict__['over'] = 8
    >>> vars(obj)
    {'over': 8}
    >>> obj.over
    -> Overriding.__get__(<Overriding object>, <Managed object>,
        <class Managed>)

Create Managed object for testing.

obj.over triggers the descriptor __get__ method, passing the managed instance obj as the second argument.

Managed.over triggers the descriptor __get__ method, passing None as the second argument (instance).

Assigning to obj.over triggers the descriptor __set__ method, passing the value 7 as the last argument.

Reading obj.over still invokes the descriptor __get__ method.

Bypassing the descriptor, setting a value directly to the obj.__dict__.

Verify that the value is in the obj.__dict__, under the over key.

However, even with an instance attribute named over, the Managed.over descriptor still overrides attempts to read obj.over.

Overriding Descriptor Without __get__

Usually, overriding descriptors implement both __set__ and __get__, but it’s also possible to implement only __set__, as we saw in Example 20-1. In this case, only writing is handled by the descriptor. Reading the descriptor through an instance will return the descriptor object itself because there is no __get__ to handle that access. If a namesake instance attribute is created with a new value via direct access to the instance __dict__, the __set__ method will still override further attempts to set that attribute, but reading that attribute will simply return the new value from the instance, instead of returning the descriptor object. In other words, the instance attribute will shadow the descriptor, but only when reading. See Example 20-10.

Example 20-10. Overriding descriptor without __get__: obj.over_no_get is an instance of OverridingNoGet (Example 20-8)

    >>> obj.over_no_get
    <__main__.OverridingNoGet object at 0x665bcc>
    >>> Managed.over_no_get
    <__main__.OverridingNoGet object at 0x665bcc>
    >>> obj.over_no_get = 7
    -> OverridingNoGet.__set__(<OverridingNoGet object>, <Managed object>, 7)
    >>> obj.over_no_get
    <__main__.OverridingNoGet object at 0x665bcc>
    >>> obj.__dict__['over_no_get'] = 9
    >>> obj.over_no_get
    9
    >>> obj.over_no_get = 7
    -> OverridingNoGet.__set__(<OverridingNoGet object>, <Managed object>, 7)
    >>> obj.over_no_get
    9

This overriding descriptor doesn’t have a __get__ method, so reading obj.over_no_get retrieves the descriptor instance from the class.

The same thing happens if we retrieve the descriptor instance directly from the managed class.

Trying to set a value to obj.over_no_get invokes the __set__ descriptor method.

Because our __set__ doesn’t make changes, reading obj.over_no_get again retrieves the descriptor instance from the managed class.

Going through the instance __dict__ to set an instance attribute named over_no_get.

Now that over_no_get instance attribute shadows the descriptor, but only for reading.

Trying to assign a value to obj.over_no_get still goes through the descriptor set.

But for reading, that descriptor is shadowed as long as there is a namesake instance attribute.

Nonoverriding Descriptor

If a descriptor does not implement __set__, then it’s a nonoverriding descriptor. Setting an instance attribute with the same name will shadow the descriptor, rendering it ineffective for handling that attribute in that specific instance. Methods are implemented as nonoverriding descriptors. Example 20-11 shows the operation of a nonoverriding descriptor.

Example 20-11. Behavior of a nonoverriding descriptor: obj.non_over is an instance of NonOverriding (Example 20-8)

    >>> obj = Managed()
    >>> obj.non_over
    -> NonOverriding.__get__(<NonOverriding object>, <Managed object>,
        <class Managed>)
    >>> obj.non_over = 7
    >>> obj.non_over
    7
    >>> Managed.non_over
    -> NonOverriding.__get__(<NonOverriding object>, None, <class Managed>)
    >>> del obj.non_over
    >>> obj.non_over
    -> NonOverriding.__get__(<NonOverriding object>, <Managed object>,
        <class Managed>)

obj.non_over triggers the descriptor __get__ method, passing obj as the second argument.

Managed.non_over is a nonoverriding descriptor, so there is no __set__ to interfere with this assignment.

The obj now has an instance attribute named non_over, which shadows the namesake descriptor attribute in the Managed class.

The Managed.non_over descriptor is still there, and catches this access via the class.

If the non_over instance attribute is deleted…

Then reading obj.non_over hits the __get__ method of the descriptor in the class, but note that the second argument is the managed instance.

Warning

Python contributors and authors use different terms when discussing these concepts. Overriding descriptors are also called data descriptors or enforced descriptors. Nonoverriding descriptors are also known as nondata descriptors or shadowable descriptors.

In the previous examples, we saw several assignments to an instance attribute with the same name as a descriptor, and different results according to the presence of a __set__ method in the descriptor.

The setting of attributes in the class cannot be controlled by descriptors attached to the same class. In particular, this means that the descriptor attributes themselves can be clobbered by assigning to the class, as the next section explains.

Overwriting a Descriptor in the Class

Regardless of whether a descriptor is overriding or not, it can be overwritten by assignment to the class. This is a monkey-patching technique, but in Example 20-12 the descriptors are replaced by integers, which would effectively break any class that depended on the descriptors for proper operation.

Example 20-12. Any descriptor can be overwritten on the class itself

    >>> obj = Managed()
    >>> Managed.over = 1
    >>> Managed.over_no_get = 2
    >>> Managed.non_over = 3
    >>> obj.over, obj.over_no_get, obj.non_over
    (1, 2, 3)

Create a new instance for later testing.

Overwrite the descriptor attributes in the class.

The descriptors are really gone.

Example 20-12 reveals another asymmetry regarding reading and writing attributes: although the reading of a class attribute can be controlled by a descriptor with __get__ attached to the managed class, the writing of a class attribute cannot be handled by a descriptor with __set__ attached to the same class.

Tip

In order to control the setting of attributes in a class, you have to attach descriptors to the class of the class—in other words, the metaclass. By default, the metaclass of user-defined classes is type, and you cannot add attributes to type. But in Chapter 21, we’ll create our own metaclasses.

Let’s now focus on how descriptors are used to implement methods in Python.

Methods Are Descriptors

A function within a class becomes a bound method because all user-defined functions have a __get__ method, therefore they operate as descriptors when attached to a class. Example 20-13 demonstrates reading the spam method from the Managed class introduced in Example 20-8.

Example 20-13. A method is a nonoverriding descriptor

    >>> obj = Managed()
    >>> obj.spam
    <bound method Managed.spam of <descriptorkinds.Managed object at 0x74c80c>>
    >>> Managed.spam
    <function Managed.spam at 0x734734>
    >>> obj.spam = 7
    >>> obj.spam
    7

Reading from obj.spam retrieves a bound method object.

But reading from Managed.spam retrieves a function.

Assigning a value to obj.spam shadows the class attribute, rendering the spam method inaccessible from the obj instance.

Because functions do not implement __set__, they are nonoverriding descriptors, as the last line of Example 20-13 shows.

The other key takeaway from Example 20-13 is that obj.spam and Managed.spam retrieve different objects. As usual with descriptors, the __get__ of a function returns a reference to itself when the access happens through the managed class. But when the access goes through an instance, the __get__ of the function returns a bound method object: a callable that wraps the function and binds the managed instance (e.g., obj) to the first argument of the function (i.e., self), like the functools.partial function does (as seen in “Freezing Arguments with functools.partial”).

For a deeper understanding of this mechanism, take a look at Example 20-14.

Example 20-14. method_is_descriptor.py: a Text class, derived from UserString

import collections

class Text(collections.UserString):

    def __repr__(self):
        return 'Text({!r})'.format(self.data)

    def reverse(self):
        return self[::-1]

Now let’s investigate the Text.reverse method. See Example 20-15.

Example 20-15. Experiments with a method

    >>> word = Text('forward')
    >>> word
    Text('forward')
    >>> word.reverse()
    Text('drawrof')
    >>> Text.reverse(Text('backward'))
    Text('drawkcab')
    >>> type(Text.reverse), type(word.reverse)
    (<class 'function'>, <class 'method'>)
    >>> list(map(Text.reverse, ['repaid', (10, 20, 30), Text('stressed')]))
    ['diaper', (30, 20, 10), Text('desserts')]
    >>> Text.reverse.__get__(word)
    <bound method Text.reverse of Text('forward')>
    >>> Text.reverse.__get__(None, Text)
    <function Text.reverse at 0x101244e18>
    >>> word.reverse
    <bound method Text.reverse of Text('forward')>
    >>> word.reverse.__self__
    Text('forward')
    >>> word.reverse.__func__ is Text.reverse
    True

The repr of a Text instance looks like a Text constructor call that would make an equal instance.

The reverse method returns the text spelled backward.

A method called on the class works as a function.

Note the different types: a function and a method.

Text.reverse operates as a function, even working with objects that are not instances of Text.

Any function is a nonoverriding descriptor. Calling its __get__ with an instance retrieves a method bound to that instance.

Calling the function’s __get__ with None as the instance argument retrieves the function itself.

The expression word.reverse actually invokes Text.reverse.__get__(word), returning the bound method.

The bound method object has a __self__ attribute holding a reference to the instance on which the method was called.

The __func__ attribute of the bound method is a reference to the original function attached to the managed class.

The bound method object also has a __call__ method, which handles the actual invocation. This method calls the original function referenced in __func__, passing the __self__ attribute of the method as the first argument. That’s how the implicit binding of the conventional self argument works.

The way functions are turned into bound methods is a prime example of how descriptors are used as infrastructure in the language.

After this deep dive into how descriptors and methods work, let’s go through some practical advice about their use.

Descriptor Usage Tips

The following list addresses some practical consequences of the descriptor characteristics just described:

Use property to Keep It Simple

The property built-in actually creates overriding descriptors implementing both __set__ and __get__, even if you do not define a setter method. The default __set__ of a property raises AttributeError: can't set attribute, so a property is the easiest way to create a read-only attribute, avoiding the issue described next.

Read-only descriptors require __set__

If you use a descriptor class to implement a read-only attribute, you must remember to code both __get__ and __set__, otherwise setting a namesake attribute on an instance will shadow the descriptor. The __set__ method of a read-only attribute should just raise AttributeError with a suitable message.⁵

Validation descriptors can work with __set__ only

In a descriptor designed only for validation, the __set__ method should check the value argument it gets, and if valid, set it directly in the instance __dict__ using the descriptor instance name as key. That way, reading the attribute with the same name from the instance will be as fast as possible, because it will not require a __get__. See the code for Example 20-1.

Caching can be done efficiently with __get__ only

If you code just the __get__ method, you have a nonoverriding descriptor. These are useful to make some expensive computation and then cache the result by setting an attribute by the same name on the instance. The namesake instance attribute will shadow the descriptor, so subsequent access to that attribute will fetch it directly from the instance __dict__ and not trigger the descriptor __get__ anymore.

Nonspecial methods can be shadowed by instance attributes

Because functions and methods only implement __get__, they do not handle attempts at setting instance attributes with the same name, so a simple assignment like my_obj.the_method = 7 means that further access to the_method through that instance will retrieve the number 7—without affecting the class or other instances. However, this issue does not interfere with special methods. The interpreter only looks for special methods in the class itself, in other words, repr(x) is executed as x.__class__.__repr__(x), so a __repr__ attribute defined in x has no effect on repr(x). For the same reason, the existence of an attribute named __getattr__ in an instance will not subvert the usual attribute access algorithm.

The fact that nonspecial methods can be overridden so easily in instances may sound fragile and error-prone, but I personally have never been bitten by this in more than 15 years of Python coding. On the other hand, if you are doing a lot of dynamic attribute creation, where the attribute names come from data you don’t control (as we did in the earlier parts of this chapter), then you should be aware of this and perhaps implement some filtering or escaping of the dynamic attribute names to preserve your sanity.

Note

The FrozenJSON class in Example 19-6 is safe from instance attribute shadowing methods because its only methods are special methods and the build class method. Class methods are safe as long as they are always accessed through the class, as I did with FrozenJSON.build in Example 19-6—later replaced by __new__ in Example 19-7. The Record class (Examples 19-9 and 19-11) and subclasses are also safe: they use only special methods, class methods, static methods, and properties. Properties are data descriptors, so cannot be overridden by instance attributes.

To close this chapter, we’ll cover two features we saw with properties that we have not addressed in the context of descriptors: documentation and handling attempts to delete a managed attribute.

Descriptor docstring and Overriding Deletion

The docstring of a descriptor class is used to document every instance of the descriptor in the managed class. See Figure 20-6 for the help displays for the LineItem class with the Quantity and NonBlank descriptors from Examples 20-6 and 20-7.

Figure 20-6. Screenshots of the Python console when issuing the commands help(LineItem.weight) and help(LineItem)

That is somewhat unsatisfactory. In the case of LineItem, it would be good to add, for example, the information that weight must be in kilograms. That would be trivial with properties, because each property handles a specific managed attribute. But with descriptors, the same Quantity descriptor class is used for weight and price.⁶

The second detail we discussed with properties but have not addressed with descriptors is handling attempts to delete a managed attribute. That can be done by implementing a __delete__ method alongside or instead of the usual __get__ and/or __set__ in the descriptor class. Coding a silly descriptor class with __delete__ is left as an exercise to the leisurely reader.

Chapter Summary

The first example of this chapter was a continuation of the LineItem examples from Chapter 19. In Example 20-1, we replaced properties with descriptors. We saw that a descriptor is a class that provides instances that are deployed as attributes in the managed class. Discussing this mechanism required special terminology, introducing terms such as managed instance and storage attribute.

In “LineItem Take #4: Automatic Storage Attribute Names”, we removed the requirement that Quantity descriptors were declared with an explicit storage_name, which was redundant and error-prone, because that name should always match the attribute name on the left of the assignment in the descriptor instantiation. The solution was to generate unique storage_names by combining the descriptor class name with a counter at the class level (e.g., '_Quantity#1').

Next, we compared the code size, strengths, and weaknesses of a descriptor class with a property factory built on functional programming idioms. The latter works perfectly well and is simpler in some ways, but the former is more flexible and is the standard solution. A key advantage of the descriptor class was exploited in “LineItem Take #5: A New Descriptor Type”: subclassing to share code while building specialized descriptors with some common functionality.

We then looked at the different behavior of descriptors providing or omitting the __set__ method, making the crucial distinction between overriding and non-overriding descriptors. Through detailed testing we uncovered when descriptors are in control and when they are shadowed, bypassed, or overwritten.

Following that, we studied a particular category of nonoverriding descriptors: methods. Console testing revealed how a function attached to a class becomes a method when accessed through an instance, by leveraging the descriptor protocol.

To conclude the chapter, “Descriptor Usage Tips” provided a brief look at how descriptor deletion and documentation work.

Throughout this chapter, we faced a few issues that only class metaprogramming can solve, and we deferred those to Chapter 21.

Further Reading

Besides the obligatory reference to the “Data Model” chapter, Raymond Hettinger’s Descriptor HowTo Guide is a valuable resource—part of the HowTo collection in the official Python documentation.

As usual with Python object model subjects, Alex Martelli’s Python in a Nutshell, 2E (O’Reilly) is authoritative and objective, even if somewhat dated: the key mechanisms discussed in this chapter were introduced in Python 2.2, long before the 2.5 version covered by that book. Martelli also has a presentation titled Python’s Object Model, which covers properties and descriptors in depth (slides, video). Highly recommended.

For Python 3 coverage with practical examples, Python Cookbook, 3E by David Beazley and Brian K. Jones (O’Reilly), has many recipes illustrating descriptors, of which I want to highlight “6.12. Reading Nested and Variable-Sized Binary Structures,” “8.10. Using Lazily Computed Properties,” “8.13. Implementing a Data Model or Type System,” and “9.9. Defining Decorators As Classes”—the latter of which addresses deep issues with the interaction of function decorators, descriptors, and methods, explaining how a function decorator implemented as a class with __call__ also needs to implement __get__ if it wants to work with decorating methods as well as functions.

Soapbox

The Problem with self

“Worse is Better” is a design philosophy described by Richard P. Gabriel in “The Rise of Worse is Better”. The first priority of this philosophy is “Simplicity,” which Gabriel states as:

The design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design.

I believe the requirement to explicitly declare self as a first argument in methods is an application of “Worse is Better” in Python. The implementation is simple—elegant even—at the expense of the user interface: a method signature like def zfill(self, width): doesn’t visually match the invocation pobox.zfill(8).

Modula-3 introduced that convention—and the use of the self identifier—but there is a difference: in Modula-3, interfaces are declared separately from their implementation, and in the interface declaration the self argument is omitted, so from the user’s perspective, a method appears in an interface declaration exactly with the same number of explicit arguments it takes.

One improvement in this regard has been the error messages: for a user-defined method with one argument besides self, if the user invokes obj.meth(), Python 2.7 raises TypeError: meth() takes exactly 2 arguments (1 given), but in Python 3.4 the message is less confusing, sidestepping the issue of the argument count and naming the missing argument: meth() missing 1 required positional argument: 'x'.

Besides the use of self as an explicit argument, the requirement to qualify all access to instance attributes with self is also criticized.⁷ I personally don’t mind typing the self qualifier: it’s good to distinguish local variables from attributes. My issue is with the use of self in the def statement. But I got used to it.

Anyone who is unhappy about the explicit self in Python can feel a lot better by considering the baffling semantics of the implicit this in JavaScript. Guido had some good reasons to make self work as it does, and he wrote about them in “Adding Support for User-Defined Classes”, a post on his blog, The History of Python.

¹ Raymond Hettinger, Descriptor HowTo Guide.

² Classes and instances are drawn as rectangles in UML class diagrams. There are visual differences, but instances are rarely shown in class diagrams, so developers may not recognize them as such.

³ White truffles cost thousands of dollars per pound. Disallowing the sale of truffles for $0.01 is left as an exercise for the enterprising reader. I know a person who actually bought an $1,800 encyclopedia of statistics for $18 because of an error in an online store (not Amazon.com).

⁴ Gamma et al., Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, p. 326.

⁵ Python is not consistent in such messages. Trying to change the c.real attribute of a complex number gets AttributeError: read-only attribute, but an attempt to change c.conjugate (a method of complex), results in AttributeError: 'complex' object attribute 'conjugate' is read-only.

⁶ Customizing the help text for each descriptor instance is surprisingly hard. One solution requires dynamically building a wrapper class for each descriptor instance.

⁷ See, for example, A. M. Kuchling’s famous Python Warts post (archived); Kuchling himself is not so bothered by the self qualifier, but he mentions it—probably echoing opinions from comp.lang.python.

Chapter 21. Class Metaprogramming

[Metaclasses] are deeper magic than 99% of users should ever worry about. If you wonder whether you need them, you don’t (the people who actually need them know with certainty that they need them, and don’t need an explanation about why).¹

Tim Peters, Inventor of the timsort algorithm and prolific Python contributor

Class metaprogramming is the art of creating or customizing classes at runtime. Classes are first-class objects in Python, so a function can be used to create a new class at any time, without using the class keyword. Class decorators are also functions, but capable of inspecting, changing, and even replacing the decorated class with another class. Finally, metaclasses are the most advanced tool for class metaprogramming: they let you create whole new categories of classes with special traits, such as the abstract base classes we’ve already seen.

Metaclasses are powerful, but hard to get right. Class decorators solve many of the same problems more simply. In fact, metaclasses are now so hard to justify in real code that my favorite motivating example lost much of its appeal with the introduction of class decorators in Python 2.6.

Also covered here is the distinction between import time and runtime: a crucial pre-requisite for effective Python metaprogramming.

Warning

This is an exciting topic, and it’s easy to get carried away. So I must start this chapter with the following admonition:

If you are not authoring a framework, you should not be writing metaclasses—unless you’re doing it for fun or to practice the concepts.

We’ll get started by reviewing how to create a class at runtime.

A Class Factory

The standard library has a class factory that we’ve seen several times in this book: collections.namedtuple. It’s a function that, given a class name and attribute names creates a subclass of tuple that allows retrieving items by name and provides a nice __repr__ for debugging.

Sometimes I’ve felt the need for a similar factory for mutable objects. Suppose I’m writing a pet shop application and I want to process data for dogs as simple records. It’s bad to have to write boilerplate like this:

class Dog:
    def __init__(self, name, weight, owner):
        self.name = name
        self.weight = weight
        self.owner = owner

Boring… the field names appear three times each. All that boilerplate doesn’t even buy us a nice repr:

>>> rex = Dog('Rex', 30, 'Bob')
>>> rex
<__main__.Dog object at 0x2865bac>

Taking a hint from collections.namedtuple, let’s create a record_factory that creates simple classes like Dog on the fly. Example 21-1 shows how it should work.

Example 21-1. Testing record_factory, a simple class factory

    >>> Dog = record_factory('Dog', 'name weight owner')
    >>> rex = Dog('Rex', 30, 'Bob')
    >>> rex
    Dog(name='Rex', weight=30, owner='Bob')
    >>> name, weight, _ = rex
    >>> name, weight
    ('Rex', 30)
    >>> "{2}'s dog weighs {1}kg".format(*rex)
    "Bob's dog weighs 30kg"
    >>> rex.weight = 32
    >>> rex
    Dog(name='Rex', weight=32, owner='Bob')
    >>> Dog.__mro__
    (<class 'factories.Dog'>, <class 'object'>)

Factory signature is similar to that of namedtuple: class name, followed by attribute names in a single string, separated by spaces or commas.

Nice repr.

Instances are iterable, so they can be conveniently unpacked on assignment…

…or when passing to functions like format.

A record instance is mutable.

The newly created class inherits from object—no relationship to our factory.

The code for record_factory is in Example 21-2.²

Example 21-2. record_factory.py: a simple class factory

def record_factory(cls_name, field_names):
    try:
        field_names = field_names.replace(',', ' ').split()
    except AttributeError:  # no .replace or .split
        pass  # assume it's already a sequence of identifiers
    field_names = tuple(field_names)

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        attrs = dict(zip(self.__slots__, args))
        attrs.update(kwargs)
        for name, value in attrs.items():
            setattr(self, name, value)

    def __iter__(self):
        for name in self.__slots__:
            yield getattr(self, name)

    def __repr__(self):
        values = ', '.join('{}={!r}'.format(*i) for i
                           in zip(self.__slots__, self))
        return '{}({})'.format(self.__class__.__name__, values)

    cls_attrs = dict(__slots__ = field_names,
                     __init__  = __init__,
                     __iter__  = __iter__,
                     __repr__  = __repr__)

    return type(cls_name, (object,), cls_attrs)

Duck typing in practice: try to split field_names by commas or spaces; if that fails, assume it’s already an iterable, with one name per item.

Build a tuple of attribute names, this will be the __slots__ attribute of the new class; this also sets the order of the fields for unpacking and __repr__.

This function will become the __init__ method in the new class. It accepts positional and/or keyword arguments.

Implement an __iter__, so the class instances will be iterable; yield the field values in the order given by __slots__.

Produce the nice repr, iterating over __slots__ and self.

Assemble dictionary of class attributes.

Build and return the new class, calling the type constructor.

We usually think of type as a function, because we use it like one, e.g., type(my_object) to get the class of the object—same as my_object.__class__. However, type is a class. It behaves like a class that creates a new class when invoked with three arguments:

MyClass = type('MyClass', (MySuperClass, MyMixin),
               {'x': 42, 'x2': lambda self: self.x * 2})

The three arguments of type are named name, bases, and dict—the latter being a mapping of attribute names and attributes for the new class. The preceding code is functionally equivalent to this:

class MyClass(MySuperClass, MyMixin):
    x = 42

    def x2(self):
        return self.x * 2

The novelty here is that the instances of type are classes, like MyClass here, or the Dog class in Example 21-1.

In summary, the last line of record_factory in Example 21-2 builds a class named by the value of cls_name, with object as its single immediate superclass and with class attributes named __slots__, __init__, __iter__, and __repr__, of which the last three are instance methods.

We could have named the __slots__ class attribute anything else, but then we’d have to implement __setattr__ to validate the names of attributes being assigned, because for our record-like classes we want the set of attributes to be always the same and in the same order. However, recall that the main feature of __slots__ is saving memory when you are dealing with millions of instances, and using __slots__ has some drawbacks, discussed in “Saving Space with the __slots__ Class Attribute”.

Invoking type with three arguments is a common way of creating a class dynamically. If you peek at the source code for collections.namedtuple, you’ll see a different approach: there is _class_template, a source code template as a string, and the namedtuple function fills its blanks calling _class_template.format(…). The resulting source code string is then evaluated with the exec built-in function.

Warning

It’s good practice to avoid exec or eval for metaprogramming in Python. These functions pose serious security risks if they are fed strings (even fragments) from untrusted sources. Python offers sufficient introspection tools to make exec and eval unnecessary most of the time. However, the Python core developers chose to use exec when implementing namedtuple. The chosen approach makes the code generated for the class available in the ._source attribute.

Instances of classes created by record_factory have a limitation: they are not serializable—that is, they can’t be used with the dump/load functions from the pickle module. Solving this problem is beyond the scope of this example, which aims to show the type class in action in a simple use case. For the full solution, study the source code for collections.nameduple; search for the word “pickling.”

A Class Decorator for Customizing Descriptors

When we left the LineItem example in “LineItem Take #5: A New Descriptor Type”, the issue of descriptive storage names was still pending: the value of attributes such as weight was stored in an instance attribute named _Quantity#0, which made debugging a bit hard. You can retrieve the storage name from a descriptor in Example 20-7 with the following lines:

>>> LineItem.weight.storage_name
'_Quantity#0'

However, it would be better if the storage names actually included the name of the managed attribute, like this:

>>> LineItem.weight.storage_name
'_Quantity#weight'

Recall from “LineItem Take #4: Automatic Storage Attribute Names” that we could not use descriptive storage names because when the descriptor is instantiated it has no way of knowing the name of the managed attribute (i.e., the class attribute to which the descriptor will be bound, such as weight in the preceding examples). But once the whole class is assembled and the descriptors are bound to the class attributes, we can inspect the class and set proper storage names to the descriptors. This could be done in the __new__ method of the LineItem class, so that by the time the descriptors are used in the __init__ method, the correct storage names are set. The problem of using __new__ for that purpose is wasted effort: the logic of __new__ will run every time a new LineItem instance is created, but the binding of the descriptor to the managed attribute will never change once the LineItem class itself is built. So we need to set the storage names when the class is created. That can be done with a class decorator or a metaclass. We’ll do it first in the easier way.

A class decorator is very similar to a function decorator: it’s a function that gets a class object and returns the same class or a modified one.

In Example 21-3, the LineItem class will be evaluated by the interpreter and the resulting class object will be passed to the model.entity function. Python will bind the global name LineItem to whatever the model.entity function returns. In this example, model.entity returns the same LineItem class with the storage_name attribute of each descriptor instance changed.

Example 21-3. bulkfood_v6.py: LineItem using Quantity and NonBlank descriptors

import model_v6 as model

@model.entity
class LineItem:
    description = model.NonBlank()
    weight = model.Quantity()
    price = model.Quantity()

    def __init__(self, description, weight, price):
        self.description = description
        self.weight = weight
        self.price = price

    def subtotal(self):
        return self.weight * self.price

The only change in this class is the added decorator.

Example 21-4 shows the implementation of the decorator. Only the new code at the bottom of model_v6.py is listed here; the rest of the module is identical to model_v5.py (Example 20-6).

Example 21-4. model_v6.py: a class decorator

def entity(cls):
    for key, attr in cls.__dict__.items():
        if isinstance(attr, Validated):
            type_name = type(attr).__name__
            attr.storage_name = '_{}#{}'.format(type_name, key)
    return cls

Decorator gets class as argument.

Iterate over dict holding the class attributes.

If the attribute is one of our Validated descriptors…

…set the storage_name to use the descriptor class name and the managed attribute name (e.g., _NonBlank#description).

Return the modified class.

The doctests in bulkfood_v6.py prove that the changes are successful. For example, Example 21-5 shows the names of the storage attributes in a LineItem instance.

Example 21-5. bulkfood_v6.py: doctests for new storage_name descriptor attributes

    >>> raisins = LineItem('Golden raisins', 10, 6.95)
    >>> dir(raisins)[:3]
    ['_NonBlank#description', '_Quantity#price', '_Quantity#weight']
    >>> LineItem.description.storage_name
    '_NonBlank#description'
    >>> raisins.description
    'Golden raisins'
    >>> getattr(raisins, '_NonBlank#description')
    'Golden raisins'

That’s not too complicated. Class decorators are a simpler way of doing something that previously required a metaclass: customizing a class the moment it’s created.

A significant drawback of class decorators is that they act only on the class where they are directly applied. This means subclasses of the decorated class may or may not inherit the changes made by the decorator, depending on what those changes are. We’ll explore the problem and see how it’s solved in the following sections.

What Happens When: Import Time Versus Runtime

For successful metaprogramming, you must be aware of when the Python interpreter evaluates each block of code. Python programmers talk about “import time” versus “runtime” but the terms are not strictly defined and there is a gray area between them. At import time, the interpreter parses the source code of a .py module in one pass from top to bottom, and generates the bytecode to be executed. That’s when syntax errors may occur. If there is an up-to-date .pyc file available in the local __pycache__, those steps are skipped because the bytecode is ready to run.

Although compiling is definitely an import-time activity, other things may happen at that time, because almost every statement in Python is executable in the sense that they potentially run user code and change the state of the user program. In particular, the import statement is not merely a declaration³ but it actually runs all the top-level code of the imported module when it’s imported for the first time in the process—further imports of the same module will use a cache, and only name binding occurs then. That top-level code may do anything, including actions typical of “runtime”, such as connecting to a database.⁴ That’s why the border between “import time” and “runtime” is fuzzy: the import statement can trigger all sorts of “runtime” behavior.

In the previous paragraph, I wrote that importing “runs all the top-level code,” but “top-level code” requires some elaboration. The interpreter executes a def statement on the top level of a module when the module is imported, but what does that achieve? The interpreter compiles the function body (if it’s the first time that module is imported), and binds the function object to its global name, but it does not execute the body of the function, obviously. In the usual case, this means that the interpreter defines top-level functions at import time, but executes their bodies only when—and if—the functions are invoked at runtime.

For classes, the story is different: at import time, the interpreter executes the body of every class, even the body of classes nested in other classes. Execution of a class body means that the attributes and methods of the class are defined, and then the class object itself is built. In this sense, the body of classes is “top-level code”: it runs at import time.

This is all rather subtle and abstract, so here is an exercise to help you see what happens when.

The Evaluation Time Exercises

Consider a script, evaltime.py, which imports a module evalsupport.py. Both modules have several print calls to output markers in the format <[N]>, where N is a number. The goal of this pair of exercises is to determine when each of theses calls will be made.

Note

Students have reported these exercises are helpful to better appreciate how Python evaluates the source code. Do take the time to solve them with paper and pencil before looking at “Solution for scenario #1”.

The listings are Examples 21-6 and 21-7. Grab paper and pencil and—without running the code—write down the markers in the order they will appear in the output, in two scenarios:

Scenario #1

The module evaltime.py is imported interactively in the Python console:

>>> import evaltime

Scenario #2

The module evaltime.py is run from the command shell:

$ python3 evaltime.py

Example 21-6. evaltime.py: write down the numbered <[N]> markers in the order they will appear in the output

from evalsupport import deco_alpha

print('<[1]> evaltime module start')

class ClassOne():
    print('<[2]> ClassOne body')

    def __init__(self):
        print('<[3]> ClassOne.__init__')

    def __del__(self):
        print('<[4]> ClassOne.__del__')

    def method_x(self):
        print('<[5]> ClassOne.method_x')

    class ClassTwo(object):
        print('<[6]> ClassTwo body')

@deco_alpha
class ClassThree():
    print('<[7]> ClassThree body')

    def method_y(self):
        print('<[8]> ClassThree.method_y')

class ClassFour(ClassThree):
    print('<[9]> ClassFour body')

    def method_y(self):
        print('<[10]> ClassFour.method_y')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print('<[11]> ClassOne tests', 30 * '.')
    one = ClassOne()
    one.method_x()
    print('<[12]> ClassThree tests', 30 * '.')
    three = ClassThree()
    three.method_y()
    print('<[13]> ClassFour tests', 30 * '.')
    four = ClassFour()
    four.method_y()

print('<[14]> evaltime module end')

Example 21-7. evalsupport.py: module imported by evaltime.py

print('<[100]> evalsupport module start')

def deco_alpha(cls):
    print('<[200]> deco_alpha')

    def inner_1(self):
        print('<[300]> deco_alpha:inner_1')

    cls.method_y = inner_1
    return cls

class MetaAleph(type):
    print('<[400]> MetaAleph body')

    def __init__(cls, name, bases, dic):
        print('<[500]> MetaAleph.__init__')

        def inner_2(self):
            print('<[600]> MetaAleph.__init__:inner_2')

        cls.method_z = inner_2

print('<[700]> evalsupport module end')

Solution for scenario #1

Example 21-8 is the output of importing the evaltime.py module in the Python console.

Example 21-8. Scenario #1: importing evaltime in the Python console

>>> import evaltime
<[100]> evalsupport module start
<[400]> MetaAleph body
<[700]> evalsupport module end
<[1]> evaltime module start
<[2]> ClassOne body
<[6]> ClassTwo body
<[7]> ClassThree body
<[200]> deco_alpha
<[9]> ClassFour body
<[14]> evaltime module end

All top-level code in evalsupport runs when the module is imported; the deco_alpha function is compiled, but its body does not execute.

The body of the MetaAleph class does run.

The body of every class is executed…

…including nested classes.

The decorator function runs after the body of the decorated ClassThree is evaluated.

In this scenario, the evaltime is imported, so the if __name__ == '__main__': block never runs.

Notes about scenario #1:

This scenario is triggered by a simple import evaltime statement.

The interpreter executes every class body of the imported module and its dependency, evalsupport.

It makes sense that the interpreter evaluates the body of a decorated class before it invokes the decorator function that is attached on top of it: the decorator must get a class object to process, so the class object must be built first.

The only user-defined function or method that runs in this scenario is the deco_alpha decorator.

Now let’s see what happens in scenario #2.

Solution for scenario #2

Example 21-9 is the output of running python evaltime.py.

Example 21-9. Scenario #2: running evaltime.py from the shell

$ python3 evaltime.py
<[100]> evalsupport module start
<[400]> MetaAleph body
<[700]> evalsupport module end
<[1]> evaltime module start
<[2]> ClassOne body
<[6]> ClassTwo body
<[7]> ClassThree body
<[200]> deco_alpha
<[9]> ClassFour body
<[11]> ClassOne tests ..............................
<[3]> ClassOne.__init__
<[5]> ClassOne.method_x
<[12]> ClassThree tests ..............................
<[300]> deco_alpha:inner_1
<[13]> ClassFour tests ..............................
<[10]> ClassFour.method_y
<[14]> evaltime module end
<[4]> ClassOne.__del__

Same output as Example 21-8 so far.

Standard behavior of a class.

ClassThree.method_y was changed by the deco_alpha decorator, so the call three.method_y() runs the body of the inner_1 function.

The ClassOne instance bound to one global variable is garbage-collected only when the program ends.

The main point of scenario #2 is to show that the effects of a class decorator may not affect subclasses. In Example 21-6, ClassFour is defined as a subclass of ClassThree. The @deco_alpha decorator is applied to ClassThree, replacing its method_y, but that does not affect ClassFour at all. Of course, if the ClassFour.method_y did invoke the ClassThree.method_y with super(…), we would see the effect of the decorator, as the inner_1 function executed.

In contrast, the next section will show that metaclasses are more effective when we want to customize a whole class hierarchy, and not one class at a time.

Metaclasses 101

A metaclass is a class factory, except that instead of a function, like record_factory from Example 21-2, a metaclass is written as a class. Figure 21-1 depicts a metaclass using the Mills & Gizmos Notation: a mill producing another mill.

Figure 21-1. A metaclass is a class that builds classes

Consider the Python object model: classes are objects, therefore each class must be an instance of some other class. By default, Python classes are instances of type. In other words, type is the metaclass for most built-in and user-defined classes:

>>> 'spam'.__class__
<class 'str'>
>>> str.__class__
<class 'type'>
>>> from bulkfood_v6 import LineItem
>>> LineItem.__class__
<class 'type'>
>>> type.__class__
<class 'type'>

To avoid infinite regress, type is an instance of itself, as the last line shows.

Note that I am not saying that str or LineItem inherit from type. What I am saying is that str and LineItem are instances of type. They all are subclasses of object. Figure 21-2 may help you confront this strange reality.

Figure 21-2. Both diagrams are true. The left one emphasizes that str, type, and LineItem are subclasses of object. The right one makes it clear that str, object, and LineItem are instances of type, because they are all classes.

Note

The classes object and type have a unique relationship: object is an instance of type, and type is a subclass of object. This relationship is “magic”: it cannot be expressed in Python because either class would have to exist before the other could be defined. The fact that type is an instance of itself is also magical.

Besides type, a few other metaclasses exist in the standard library, such as ABCMeta and Enum. The next snippet shows that the class of collections.Iterable is abc.ABCMeta. The class Iterable is abstract, but ABCMeta is not—after all, Iterable is an instance of ABCMeta:

>>> import collections
>>> collections.Iterable.__class__
<class 'abc.ABCMeta'>
>>> import abc
>>> abc.ABCMeta.__class__
<class 'type'>
>>> abc.ABCMeta.__mro__
(<class 'abc.ABCMeta'>, <class 'type'>, <class 'object'>)

Ultimately, the class of ABCMeta is also type. Every class is an instance of type, directly or indirectly, but only metaclasses are also subclasses of type. That’s the most important relationship to understand metaclasses: a metaclass, such as ABCMeta, inherits from type the power to construct classes. Figure 21-3 illustrates this crucial relationship.

Figure 21-3. Iterable is a subclass of object and an instance of ABCMeta. Both object and ABCMeta are instances of type, but the key relationship here is that ABCMeta is also a subclass of type, because ABCMeta is a metaclass. In this diagram, Iterable is the only abstract class.

The important takeaway here is that all classes are instances of type, but metaclasses are also subclasses of type, so they act as class factories. In particular, a metaclass can customize its instances by implementing __init__. A metaclass __init__ method can do everything a class decorator can do, but its effects are more profound, as the next exercise demonstrates.

The Metaclass Evaluation Time Exercise

This is a variation of “The Evaluation Time Exercises”. The evalsupport.py module is the same as Example 21-7, but the main script is now evaltime_meta.py, listed in Example 21-10.

Example 21-10. evaltime_meta.py: ClassFive is an instance of the MetaAleph metaclass

from evalsupport import deco_alpha
from evalsupport import MetaAleph

print('<[1]> evaltime_meta module start')

@deco_alpha
class ClassThree():
    print('<[2]> ClassThree body')

    def method_y(self):
        print('<[3]> ClassThree.method_y')

class ClassFour(ClassThree):
    print('<[4]> ClassFour body')

    def method_y(self):
        print('<[5]> ClassFour.method_y')

class ClassFive(metaclass=MetaAleph):
    print('<[6]> ClassFive body')

    def __init__(self):
        print('<[7]> ClassFive.__init__')

    def method_z(self):
        print('<[8]> ClassFive.method_z')

class ClassSix(ClassFive):
    print('<[9]> ClassSix body')

    def method_z(self):
        print('<[10]> ClassSix.method_z')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print('<[11]> ClassThree tests', 30 * '.')
    three = ClassThree()
    three.method_y()
    print('<[12]> ClassFour tests', 30 * '.')
    four = ClassFour()
    four.method_y()
    print('<[13]> ClassFive tests', 30 * '.')
    five = ClassFive()
    five.method_z()
    print('<[14]> ClassSix tests', 30 * '.')
    six = ClassSix()
    six.method_z()

print('<[15]> evaltime_meta module end')

Again, grab pencil and paper and write down the numbered <[N]> markers in the order they will appear in the output, considering these two scenarios:

Scenario #3

The module evaltime_meta.py is imported interactively in the Python console.

Scenario #4

The module evaltime_meta.py is run from the command shell.

Solutions and analysis are next.

Solution for scenario #3

Example 21-11 shows the output of importing evaltime_meta.py in the Python console.

Example 21-11. Scenario #3: importing evaltime_meta in the Python console

>>> import evaltime_meta
<[100]> evalsupport module start
<[400]> MetaAleph body
<[700]> evalsupport module end
<[1]> evaltime_meta module start
<[2]> ClassThree body
<[200]> deco_alpha
<[4]> ClassFour body
<[6]> ClassFive body
<[500]> MetaAleph.__init__
<[9]> ClassSix body
<[500]> MetaAleph.__init__
<[15]> evaltime_meta module end

The key difference from scenario #1 is that the MetaAleph.__init__ method is invoked to initialize the just-created ClassFive.

And MetaAleph.__init__ also initializes ClassSix, which is a subclass of ClassFive.

The Python interpreter evaluates the body of ClassFive but then, instead of calling type to build the actual class body, it calls MetaAleph. Looking at the definition of MetaAleph in Example 21-12, you’ll see that the __init__ method gets four arguments:

self

That’s the class object being initialized (e.g., ClassFive)

name, bases, dic

The same arguments passed to type to build a class

Example 21-12. evalsupport.py: definition of the metaclass MetaAleph from Example 21-7

class MetaAleph(type):
    print('<[400]> MetaAleph body')

    def __init__(cls, name, bases, dic):
        print('<[500]> MetaAleph.__init__')

        def inner_2(self):
            print('<[600]> MetaAleph.__init__:inner_2')

        cls.method_z = inner_2

Note

When coding a metaclass, it’s conventional to replace self with cls. For example, in the __init__ method of the metaclass, using cls as the name of the first argument makes it clear that the instance under construction is a class.

The body of __init__ defines an inner_2 function, then binds it to cls.method_z. The name cls in the signature of MetaAleph.__init__ refers to the class being created (e.g., ClassFive). On the other hand, the name self in the signature of inner_2 will eventually refer to an instance of the class we are creating (e.g., an instance of ClassFive).

Solution for scenario #4

Example 21-13 shows the output of running python evaltime.py from the command line.

Example 21-13. Scenario #4: running evaltime_meta.py from the shell

$ python3 evaltime.py
<[100]> evalsupport module start
<[400]> MetaAleph body
<[700]> evalsupport module end
<[1]> evaltime_meta module start
<[2]> ClassThree body
<[200]> deco_alpha
<[4]> ClassFour body
<[6]> ClassFive body
<[500]> MetaAleph.__init__
<[9]> ClassSix body
<[500]> MetaAleph.__init__
<[11]> ClassThree tests ..............................
<[300]> deco_alpha:inner_1
<[12]> ClassFour tests ..............................
<[5]> ClassFour.method_y
<[13]> ClassFive tests ..............................
<[7]> ClassFive.__init__
<[600]> MetaAleph.__init__:inner_2
<[14]> ClassSix tests ..............................
<[7]> ClassFive.__init__
<[600]> MetaAleph.__init__:inner_2
<[15]> evaltime_meta module end

When the decorator is applied to ClassThree, its method_y is replaced by the inner_1 method…

But this has no effect on the undecorated ClassFour, even though ClassFour is a subclass of ClassThree.

The __init__ method of MetaAleph replaces ClassFive.method_z with its inner_2 function.

The same happens with the ClassFive subclass, ClassSix: its method_z is replaced by inner_2.

Note that ClassSix makes no direct reference to MetaAleph, but it is affected by it because it’s a subclass of ClassFive and therefore it is also an instance of MetaAleph, so it’s initialized by MetaAleph.__init__.

Tip

Further class customization can be done by implementing __new__ in a metaclass. But more often than not, implementing __init__ is enough.

We can now put all this theory in practice by creating a metaclass to provide a definitive solution to the descriptors with automatic storage attribute names.

A Metaclass for Customizing Descriptors

Back to the LineItem examples. It would be nice if the user did not have to be aware of decorators or metaclasses at all, and could just inherit from a class provided by our library, like in Example 21-14.

Example 21-14. bulkfood_v7.py: inheriting from model.Entity can work, if a metaclass is behind the scenes

import model_v7 as model

class LineItem(model.Entity):
    description = model.NonBlank()
    weight = model.Quantity()
    price = model.Quantity()

    def __init__(self, description, weight, price):
        self.description = description
        self.weight = weight
        self.price = price

    def subtotal(self):
        return self.weight * self.price

LineItem is a subclass of model.Entity.

Example 21-14 looks pretty harmless. No strange syntax to be seen at all. However, it only works because model_v7.py defines a metaclass, and model.Entity is an instance of that metaclass. Example 21-15 shows the implementation of the Entity class in the model_v7.py module.

Example 21-15. model_v7.py: the EntityMeta metaclass and one instance of it, Entity

class EntityMeta(type):
    """Metaclass for business entities with validated fields"""

    def __init__(cls, name, bases, attr_dict):
        super().__init__(name, bases, attr_dict)
        for key, attr in attr_dict.items():
            if isinstance(attr, Validated):
                type_name = type(attr).__name__
                attr.storage_name = '_{}#{}'.format(type_name, key)

class Entity(metaclass=EntityMeta):
    """Business entity with validated fields"""

Call __init__ on the superclass (type in this case).

Same logic as the @entity decorator in Example 21-4.

This class exists for convenience only: the user of this module can just subclass Entity and not worry about EntityMeta—or even be aware of its existence.

The code in Example 21-14 passes the tests in Example 21-3. The support module, model_v7.py, is harder to understand than model_v6.py, but the user-level code is simpler: just inherit from model_v7.entity and you get custom storage names for your Validated fields.

Figure 21-4 is a simplified depiction of what we just implemented. There is a lot going on, but the complexity is hidden inside the model_v7 module. From the user perspective, LineItem is simply a subclass of Entity, as coded in Example 21-14. This is the power of abstraction.

Figure 21-4. UML class diagram annotated with MGN (Mills & Gizmos Notation): the EntityMeta meta-mill builds the LineItem mill. Configuration of the descriptors (e.g., weight and price) is done by EntityMeta.__init__. Note the package boundary of model_v7.

Except for the syntax for linking a class to the metaclass,⁵ everything written so far about metaclasses applies to versions of Python as early as 2.2, when Python types underwent a major overhaul. The next section covers a feature that is only available in Python 3.

The Metaclass __prepare__ Special Method

In some applications it’s interesting to be able to know the order in which the attributes of a class are defined. For example, a library to read/write CSV files driven by user-defined classes may want to map the order of the fields declared in the class to the order of the columns in the CSV file.

As we’ve seen, both the type constructor and the __new__ and __init__ methods of metaclasses receive the body of the class evaluated as a mapping of names to attributes. However, by default, that mapping is a dict, which means the order of the attributes as they appear in the class body is lost by the time our metaclass or class decorator can look at them.

The solution to this problem is the __prepare__ special method, introduced in Python 3. This special method is relevant only in metaclasses, and it must be a class method (i.e., defined with the @classmethod decorator). The __prepare__ method is invoked by the interpreter before the __new__ method in the metaclass to create the mapping that will be filled with the attributes from the class body. Besides the metaclass as first argument, __prepare__ gets the name of the class to be constructed and its tuple of base classes, and it must return a mapping, which will be received as the last argument by __new__ and then __init__ when the metaclass builds a new class.

It sounds complicated in theory, but in practice, every time I’ve seen __prepare__ being used it was very simple. Take a look at Example 21-16.

Example 21-16. model_v8.py: the EntityMeta metaclass uses __prepare__, and Entity now has a field_names class method

class EntityMeta(type):
    """Metaclass for business entities with validated fields"""

    @classmethod
    def __prepare__(cls, name, bases):
        return collections.OrderedDict()

    def __init__(cls, name, bases, attr_dict):
        super().__init__(name, bases, attr_dict)
        cls._field_names = []
        for key, attr in attr_dict.items():
            if isinstance(attr, Validated):
                type_name = type(attr).__name__
                attr.storage_name = '_{}#{}'.format(type_name, key)
                cls._field_names.append(key)

class Entity(metaclass=EntityMeta):
    """Business entity with validated fields"""

    @classmethod
    def field_names(cls):
        for name in cls._field_names:
            yield name

Return an empty OrderedDict instance, where the class attributes will be stored.

Create a _field_names attribute in the class under construction.

This line is unchanged from the previous version, but attr_dict here is the OrderedDict obtained by the interpreter when it called __prepare__ before calling __init__. Therefore, this for loop will go over the attributes in the order they were added.

Add the name of each Validated field found to _field_names.

The field_names class method simply yields the names of the fields in the order they were added.

With the simple additions made in Example 21-16, we are now able to iterate over the Validated fields of any Entity subclass using the field_names class method. Example 21-17 demonstrates this new feature.

Example 21-17. bulkfood_v8.py: doctest showing the use of field_names—no changes are needed in the LineItem class; field_names is inherited from model.Entity

    >>> for name in LineItem.field_names():
    ...     print(name)
    ...
    description
    weight
    price

This wraps up our coverage of metaclasses. In the real world, metaclasses are used in frameworks and libraries that help programmers perform, among other tasks:

Attribute validation

Applying decorators to many methods at once

Object serialization or data conversion

Object-relational mapping

Object-based persistency

Dynamic translation of class structures from other languages

We’ll now have a brief overview of methods defined in the Python data model for all classes.

Classes as Objects

Every class has a number of attributes defined in the Python data model, documented in “4.13. Special Attributes” of the “Built-in Types” chapter in the Library Reference. Three of those attributes we’ve seen several times in the book already: __mro__, __class__, and __name__. Other class attributes are:

cls.__bases__

The tuple of base classes of the class.

cls.__qualname__

A new attribute in Python 3.3 holding the qualified name of a class or function, which is a dotted path from the global scope of the module to the class definition. For example, in Example 21-6, the __qualname__ of the inner class ClassTwo is the string 'ClassOne.ClassTwo', while its __name__ is just 'ClassTwo'. The specification for this attribute is PEP-3155 — Qualified name for classes and functions.

cls.__subclasses__()

This method returns a list of the immediate subclasses of the class. The implementation uses weak references to avoid circular references between the superclass and its subclasses—which hold a strong reference to the superclasses in their __bases__ attribute. The method returns the list of subclasses that currently exist in memory.

cls.mro()

The interpreter calls this method when building a class to obtain the tuple of superclasses that is stored in the __mro__ attribute of the class. A metaclass can override this method to customize the method resolution order of the class under construction.

Tip

None of the attributes mentioned in this section are listed by the dir(…) function.

With this, our study of class metaprogramming ends. This is a vast topic and I only scratched the surface. That’s why we have “Further Reading” sections in this book.

Chapter Summary

Class metaprogramming is about creating or customizing classes dynamically. Classes in Python are first-class objects, so we started the chapter by showing how a class can be created by a function invoking the type built-in metaclass.

In the next section, we went back to the LineItem class with descriptors from Chapter 20 to solve a lingering issue: how to generate names for the storage attributes that reflected the names of the managed attributes (e.g., _Quantity#price instead of _Quantity#1). The solution was to use a class decorator, essentially a function that gets a just-built class and has the opportunity to inspect it, change it, and even replace it with a different class.

We then moved to a discussion of when different parts of the source code of a module actually run. We saw that there is some overlap between the so-called “import time” and “runtime,” but clearly a lot of code runs triggered by the import statement. Understanding what runs when is crucial, and there are some subtle rules, so we used the evaluation-time exercises to cover this topic.

The following subject was an introduction to metaclasses. We saw that all classes are instances of type, directly or indirectly, so that is the “root metaclass” of the language. A variation of the evaluation-time exercise was designed to show that a metaclass can customize a hierarchy of classes—in contrast with a class decorator, which affects a single class and may have no impact on its descendants.

The first practical application of a metaclass was to solve the issue of the storage attribute names in LineItem. The resulting code is a bit trickier than the class decorator solution, but it can be encapsulated in a module so that the user merely subclasses an apparently plain class (model.Entity) without being aware that it is an instance of a custom metaclass (model.EntityMeta). The end result is reminiscent of the ORM APIs in Django and SQLAlchemy, which use metaclasses in their implementations but don’t require the user to know anything about them.

The second metaclass we implemented added a small feature to model.EntityMeta: a __prepare__ method to provide an OrderedDict to serve as the mapping from names to attributes. This preserves the order in which those attributes are bound in the body of the class under construction, so that metaclass methods like __new__ and __init__ can use that information. In the example, we implemented a _field_names class attribute, which made possible an Entity.field_names() so users could retrieve the Validated descriptors in the same order they appear in the source code.

The last section was a brief overview of attributes and methods available in all Python classes.

Metaclasses are challenging, exciting, and—sometimes—abused by programmers trying to be too clever. To wrap up, let’s recall Alex Martelli’s final advice from his essay “Waterfowl and ABCs”:

And, don’t define custom ABCs (or metaclasses) in production code… if you feel the urge to do so, I’d bet it’s likely to be a case of “all problems look like a nail”-syndrome for somebody who just got a shiny new hammer—you (and future maintainers of your code) will be much happier sticking with straightforward and simple code, eschewing such depths.

Alex Martelli

Wise words from a man who is not only a master of Python metaprogramming but also an accomplished software engineer working on some of the largest mission-critical Python deployments in the world.

Further Reading

The essential references for this chapter in the Python documentation are “3.3.3. Customizing class creation” in the “Data Model” chapter of The Python Language Reference, the type class documentation in the “Built-in Functions” page, and “4.13. Special Attributes” of the “Built-in Types” chapter in the Library Reference. Also, in the Library Reference, the types module documentation covers two functions that are new in Python 3.3 and are designed to help with class metaprogramming: types.new_class(…) and types.prepare_class(…).

Class decorators were formalized in PEP 3129 - Class Decorators, written by Collin Winter, with the reference implementation authored by Jack Diederich. The PyCon 2009 talk “Class Decorators: Radically Simple” (video), also by Jack Diederich, is a quick introduction to the feature.

Python in a Nutshell, 2E by Alex Martelli features outstanding coverage of metaclasses, including a metaMetaBunch metaclass that aims to solve the same problem as our simple record_factory from Example 21-2 but is much more sophisticated. Martelli does not address class decorators because the feature appeared later than his book. Beazley and Jones provide excellent examples of class decorators and metaclasses in their Python Cookbook, 3E (O’Reilly). Michael Foord wrote an intriguing post titled “Meta-classes Made Easy: Eliminating self with Metaclasses”. The subtitle says it all.

For metaclasses, the main references are PEP 3115 — Metaclasses in Python 3000, in which the __prepare__ special method was introduced and Unifying types and classes in Python 2.2, authored by Guido van Rossum. The text applies to Python 3 as well, and it covers what were then called the “new-style” class semantics, including descriptors and metaclasses. It’s a must-read. One of the references cited by Guido is Putting Metaclasses to Work: a New Dimension in Object-Oriented Programming, by Ira R. Forman and Scott H. Danforth (Addison-Wesley, 1998), a book to which he gave 5 stars on Amazon.com, adding the following review:

This book contributed to the design for metaclasses in Python 2.2

Too bad this is out of print; I keep referring to it as the best tutorial I know for the difficult subject of cooperative multiple inheritance, supported by Python via the super() function.⁶

For Python 3.5—in alpha as I write this—PEP 487 - Simpler customization of class creation puts forward a new special method, __init_subclass__ that will allow a regular class (i.e., not a metaclass) to customize the initialization of its subclasses. As with class decorators, __init_subclass__ will make class metaprogramming more accessible and also make it that much harder to justify the deployment of the nuclear option—metaclasses.

If you are into metaprogramming, you may wish Python had the ultimate metaprogramming feature: syntactic macros, as offered by Elixir and the Lisp family of languages. Be careful what you wish for. I’ll just say one word: MacroPy.

Soapbox

I will start the last soapbox in the book with a long quote from Brian Harvey and Matthew Wright, two computer science professors from the University of California (Berkeley and Santa Barbara). In their book, Simply Scheme, Harvey and Wright wrote:

There are two schools of thought about teaching computer science. We might caricature the two views this way:

The conservative view: Computer programs have become too large and complex to encompass in a human mind. Therefore, the job of computer science education is to teach people how to discipline their work in such a way that 500 mediocre programmers can join together and produce a program that correctly meets its specification.

The radical view: Computer programs have become too large and complex to encompass in a human mind. Therefore, the job of computer science education is to teach people how to expand their minds so that the programs can fit, by learning to think in a vocabulary of larger, more powerful, more flexible ideas than the obvious ones. Each unit of programming thought must have a big payoff in the capabilities of the program.⁷

Brian Harvey and Matthew Wright, Preface to Simply Scheme

Harvey and Wright’s exaggerated descriptions are about teaching computer science, but they also apply to programming language design. By now, you should have guessed that I subscribe to the “radical” view, and I believe Python was designed in that spirit.

The property idea is a great step forward compared to the accessors-from-the-start approach practically demanded by Java and supported by Java IDEs generating getters/setters with a keyboard shortcut. The main advantage of properties is to let us start our programs simply exposing attributes as public—in the spirit of KISS—knowing a public attribute can become a property at any time without much pain. But the descriptor idea goes way beyond that, providing a framework for abstracting away repetitive accessor logic. That framework is so effective that essential Python constructs use it behind the scenes.

Another powerful idea is functions as first-class objects, paving the way to higher-order functions. Turns out the combination of descriptors and higher-order functions enable the unification of functions and methods. A function’s __get__ produces a method object on the fly by binding the instance to the self argument. This is elegant.⁸

Finally, we have the idea of classes as first-class objects. It’s an outstanding feat of design that a beginner-friendly language provides powerful abstractions such as class decorators and full-fledged, user-defined metaclasses. Best of all: the advanced features are integrated in a way that does not complicate Python’s suitability for casual programming (they actually help it, under the covers). The convenience and success of frameworks such as Django and SQLAlchemy owes much to metaclasses, even if many users of these tools aren’t aware of them. But they can always learn and create the next great library.

I haven’t yet found a language that manages to be easy for beginners, practical for professionals, and exciting for hackers in the way that Python is. Thanks, Guido van Rossum and everybody else who makes it so.

¹ Message to comp.lang.python, subject: “Acrimony in c.l.p.”. This is another part of the same message from December 23, 2002, quoted in the Preface. The TimBot was inspired that day.

² Thanks to my friend J.S. Bueno for suggesting this solution.

³ Contrast with the import statement in Java, which is just a declaration to let the compiler know that certain packages are required.

⁴ I’m not saying starting a database connection just because a module is imported is a good idea, only pointing out it can be done.

⁵ Recall from “ABC Syntax Details” that in Python 2.7 the __metaclass__ class attribute is used, and the metaclass= keyword argument is not supported in the class declaration.

⁶ You can still buy it used on Amazon. I bought it and found it a hard read, but I will probably go back to it later.

⁷ Brian Harvey and Matthew Wright, Simply Scheme (MIT Press, 1999), p. xvii. Full text available at Berkeley.edu.

⁸ Machine Beauty by David Gelernter (Basic Books) is an intriguing short book about elegance and aesthetics in works of engineering, from bridges to software.

Afterword

Python is a language for consenting adults.

Alan Runyan, Cofounder of Plone

Alan’s pithy definition expresses one of the best qualities of Python: it gets out of the way and lets you do what you must. This also means it doesn’t give you tools to restrict what others can do with your code and the objects it builds.

Of course, Python is not perfect. Among the top irritants to me is the inconsistent use of CamelCase, snake_case and joinedwords in the standard library. But the language definition and the standard library are only part of an ecosystem. The community of users and contributors is the best part of the Python ecosystem.

Here is one example of the community at its best: one morning while writing about asyncio I was frustrated because the API has many functions, dozens of which are coroutines, and you have to call the coroutines with yield from but you can’t do that with regular functions. This was documented in the asyncio pages, but sometimes you had to read a few paragraphs to find out whether a particular function was a coroutine. So I sent a message to python-tulip titled “Proposal: make coroutines stand out in the asyncio docs”. Victor Stinner, an asyncio core developer, Andrew Svetlov, main author of aiohttp, Ben Darnell, lead developer of Tornado, and Glyph Lefkowitz, inventor of Twisted, joined the conversation. Darnell suggested a solution, Alexander Shorin explained how to implement it in Sphinx, and Stinner added the necessary configuration and markup. Less than 12 hours after I raised the issue, the entire asyncio documentation set online was updated with the coroutine tags you can see today.

That story did not happen in an exclusive club. Anybody can join the python-tulip list, and I had posted only a few times when I wrote the proposal. The story illustrates a community that is really open to new ideas and new members. Guido van Rossum hangs out in python-tulip and can regularly be seen answering even simple questions.

Another example of openness: the Python Software Foundation (PSF) has been working to increase diversity in the Python community. Some encouraging results are already in. The 2013–2014 PSF board saw the first women elected directors: Jessica McKellar and Lynn Root. And in the 2015 PyCon North America in Montréal—chaired by Diana Clarke—about 1/3 of the speakers were women. I am unaware of any other major IT conference that has gone so far in the pursuit of gender equality.

If you are a Pythonista but you have not engaged with the community, I encourage you to do so. Seek the Python Users Group (PUG) in your area. If there isn’t one, create it. Python is everywhere, so you will not be alone. Travel to events if you can. Come to a PythonBrasil conference—we’ve had international speakers regularly for many years now. Meeting fellow Pythonistas in person beats any online interaction and is known to bring real benefits besides all the knowledge sharing. Like real jobs and real friendships.

I know I could not have written this book without the help of many friends I made over the years in the Python community.

My father Jairo Ramalho used to say “Só erra quem trabalha”—Portuguese for “Only those who work make mistakes”—great advice to avoid being paralyzed by the fear of making errors. I certainly made my share of mistakes while writing this book. The reviewers, editors, and Early Release readers caught many of them. Within hours of the first Early Release, a reader was reporting typos in the errata page for the book. Other readers contributed more reports, and friends contacted me directly to offer suggestions and corrections. The O’Reilly copyeditors will catch other errors during the production process, which will start as soon as I manage to stop writing. I take responsibility and apologize for any errors and suboptimal prose that remains.

I am very happy to bring this work to conclusion, mistakes and all, and I am very grateful to everybody who helped along the way.

I hope to see you soon at some live event. Please come say hi if you see me around!

Further Reading

I will wrap up the book with references regarding what it its to be “Pythonic”—the main question this book tried to address.

Brandon Rhodes is an awesome Python teacher, and his talk “A Python Æsthetic: Beauty and Why I Python” is beautiful, starting with the use of Unicode U+00C6 (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AE) in the title. Another awesome teacher, Raymond Hettinger, spoke of beauty in Python at PyCon US 2013: “Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python”.

The Evolution of Style Guides thread that Ian Lee started on Python-ideas is worth reading. Lee is the maintainer of the pep8 package that checks Python source code for PEP 8 compliance. To check the code in this book, I used flake8, which wraps pep8, pyflakes, and Ned Batchelder’s McCabe complexity plug-in.

Besides PEP 8, other influential style guides are the Google Python Style Guide and the Pocoo style guide, from the team who brings us Flake, Sphinx, Jinja 2, and other great Python libraries.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python! is a collective work about writing Pythonic code. Its most prolific contributor is Kenneth Reitz, a community hero thanks to his beautifully Pythonic requests package. David Goodger presented a tutorial at PyCon US 2008 titled “Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python”. If printed, the tutorial notes are 30 pages long. Of course, the reStructuredText source is available and can be rendered to HTML and S5 slides by docutils. After all, Goodger created both reStructuredText and docutils—the foundations of Sphinx, Python’s excellent documentation system (which, by the way, is also the official documentation system for MongoDB and many other projects).

Martijn Faassen tackles the question head-on in “What is Pythonic?” In the python-list, there is a thread with that same title. Martijn’s post is from 2005, and the thread from 2003, but the Pythonic ideal hasn’t changed much—neither has the language, for that matter. A great thread with “Pythonic” in the title is “Pythonic way to sum n-th list element?”, from which I quoted extensively in “Soapbox”.

PEP 3099 — Things that will Not Change in Python 3000 explains why many things are the way they are, even after the major overhaul that was Python 3. For a long time, Python 3 was nicknamed Python 3000, but it arrived a few centuries sooner—to the dismay of some. PEP 3099 was written by Georg Brandl, compiling many opinions expressed by the BDFL, Guido van Rossum. The Python Essays page lists several texts by Guido himself.

Appendix A. Support Scripts

Here are full listings for some scripts that were too long to fit in the main text. Also included are scripts used to generate some of the tables and data fixtures used in this book.

These scripts are also available in the Fluent Python code repository, along with almost every other code snippet that appears in the book.

Chapter 3: in Operator Performance Test

Example A-1 is the code I used to produce the timings in Table 3-6 using the timeit module. The script mostly deals with setting up the haystack and needles samples and with formatting output.

While coding Example A-1, I found something that really puts dict performance in perspective. If the script is run in “verbose mode” (with the -v command-line option), the timings I get are nearly twice those in Table 3-5. But note that, in this script, “verbose mode” means only four calls to print while setting up the test, and one additional print to show the number of needles found when each test finishes. No output happens within the loop that does the actual search of the needles in the haystack, but these five print calls take about as much time as searching for 1,000 needles.

Example A-1. container_perftest.py: run it with the name of a built-in collection type as a command-line argument (e.g., container_perftest.py dict)

"""
Container ``in`` operator performance test
"""
import sys
import timeit

SETUP = '''
import array
selected = array.array('d')
with open('selected.arr', 'rb') as fp:
    selected.fromfile(fp, {size})
if {container_type} is dict:
    haystack = dict.fromkeys(selected, 1)
else:
    haystack = {container_type}(selected)
if {verbose}:
    print(type(haystack), end='  ')
    print('haystack: %10d' % len(haystack), end='  ')
needles = array.array('d')
with open('not_selected.arr', 'rb') as fp:
    needles.fromfile(fp, 500)
needles.extend(selected[::{size}//500])
if {verbose}:
    print(' needles: %10d' % len(needles), end='  ')
'''

TEST = '''
found = 0
for n in needles:
    if n in haystack:
        found += 1
if {verbose}:
    print('  found: %10d' % found)
'''

def test(container_type, verbose):
    MAX_EXPONENT = 7
    for n in range(3, MAX_EXPONENT + 1):
        size = 10**n
        setup = SETUP.format(container_type=container_type,
                             size=size, verbose=verbose)
        test = TEST.format(verbose=verbose)
        tt = timeit.repeat(stmt=test, setup=setup, repeat=5, number=1)
        print('|{:{}d}|{:f}'.format(size, MAX_EXPONENT + 1, min(tt)))

if __name__=='__main__':
    if '-v' in sys.argv:
        sys.argv.remove('-v')
        verbose = True
    else:
        verbose = False
    if len(sys.argv) != 2:
        print('Usage: %s <container_type>' % sys.argv[0])
    else:
        test(sys.argv[1], verbose)

The script container_perftest_datagen.py (Example A-2) generates the data fixture for the script in Example A-1.

Example A-2. container_perftest_datagen.py: generate files with arrays of unique floating point numbers for use in Example A-1

"""
Generate data for container performance test
"""

import random
import array

MAX_EXPONENT = 7
HAYSTACK_LEN = 10 ** MAX_EXPONENT
NEEDLES_LEN = 10 ** (MAX_EXPONENT - 1)
SAMPLE_LEN = HAYSTACK_LEN + NEEDLES_LEN // 2

needles = array.array('d')

sample = {1/random.random() for i in range(SAMPLE_LEN)}
print('initial sample: %d elements' % len(sample))

# complete sample, in case duplicate random numbers were discarded
while len(sample) < SAMPLE_LEN:
    sample.add(1/random.random())

print('complete sample: %d elements' % len(sample))

sample = array.array('d', sample)
random.shuffle(sample)

not_selected = sample[:NEEDLES_LEN // 2]
print('not selected: %d samples' % len(not_selected))
print('  writing not_selected.arr')
with open('not_selected.arr', 'wb') as fp:
    not_selected.tofile(fp)

selected = sample[NEEDLES_LEN // 2:]
print('selected: %d samples' % len(selected))
print('  writing selected.arr')
with open('selected.arr', 'wb') as fp:
    selected.tofile(fp)

Chapter 3: Compare the Bit Patterns of Hashes

Example A-3 is a simple script to visually show how different are the bit patterns for the hashes of similiar floating-point numbers (e.g., 1.0001, 1.0002, etc.). Its output appears in Example 3-16.

Example A-3. hashdiff.py: display the difference of bit paterns from hash values

import sys

MAX_BITS = len(format(sys.maxsize, 'b'))
print('%s-bit Python build' % (MAX_BITS + 1))

def hash_diff(o1, o2):
    h1 = '{:>0{}b}'.format(hash(o1), MAX_BITS)
    h2 = '{:>0{}b}'.format(hash(o2), MAX_BITS)
    diff = ''.join('!' if b1 != b2 else ' ' for b1, b2 in zip(h1, h2))
    count = '!= {}'.format(diff.count('!'))
    width = max(len(repr(o1)), len(repr(o2)), 8)
    sep = '-' * (width * 2 + MAX_BITS)
    return '{!r:{width}} {}\n{:{width}} {} {}\n{!r:{width}} {}\n{}'.format(
    		o1, h1, ' ' * width, diff, count, o2, h2, sep, width=width)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print(hash_diff(1, 1.0))
    print(hash_diff(1.0, 1.0001))
    print(hash_diff(1.0001, 1.0002))
    print(hash_diff(1.0002, 1.0003))

Chapter 9: RAM Usage With and Without __slots__

The memtest.py script was used for a demostration in “Saving Space with the __slots__ Class Attribute”: Example 9-12.

The memtest.py script takes a module name in the command line and loads it. Assuming the module defines a class named Vector, memtest.py creates a list with 10 million instances, reporting the memory usage before and after the list is created.

Example A-4. memtest.py: create lots of Vector instances reporting memory usage

import importlib
import sys
import resource

NUM_VECTORS = 10**7

if len(sys.argv) == 2:
    module_name = sys.argv[1].replace('.py', '')
    module = importlib.import_module(module_name)
else:
    print('Usage: {} <vector-module-to-test>'.format())
    sys.exit(1)

fmt = 'Selected Vector2d type: {.__name__}.{.__name__}'
print(fmt.format(module, module.Vector2d))

mem_init = resource.getrusage(resource.RUSAGE_SELF).ru_maxrss
print('Creating {:,} Vector2d instances'.format(NUM_VECTORS))

vectors = [module.Vector2d(3.0, 4.0) for i in range(NUM_VECTORS)]

mem_final = resource.getrusage(resource.RUSAGE_SELF).ru_maxrss
print('Initial RAM usage: {:14,}'.format(mem_init))
print('  Final RAM usage: {:14,}'.format(mem_final))

Chapter 14: isis2json.py Database Conversion Script

Example A-5 is the isis2json.py script discussed in “Case Study: Generators in a Database Conversion Utility” (Chapter 14). It uses generator functions to lazily convert CDS/ISIS databases to JSON for loading to CouchDB or MongoDB.

Note that this is a Python 2 script, designed to run on CPython or Jython, versions 2.5 to 2.7, but not on Python 3. Under CPython it can read only .iso files; with Jython it can also read .mst files, using the Bruma library available on the fluentpython/isis2json repository in GitHub. See usage documentation in that repository.

Example A-5. isis2json.py: dependencies and documentation available on GitHub repository fluentpython/isis2json

# this script works with Python or Jython (versions >=2.5 and <3)

import sys
import argparse
from uuid import uuid4
import os

try:
    import json
except ImportError:
    if os.name == 'java':  # running Jython
        from com.xhaus.jyson import JysonCodec as json
    else:
        import simplejson as json

SKIP_INACTIVE = True
DEFAULT_QTY = 2**31
ISIS_MFN_KEY = 'mfn'
ISIS_ACTIVE_KEY = 'active'
SUBFIELD_DELIMITER = '^'
INPUT_ENCODING = 'cp1252'

def iter_iso_records(iso_file_name, isis_json_type):
    from iso2709 import IsoFile
    from subfield import expand

    iso = IsoFile(iso_file_name)
    for record in iso:
        fields = {}
        for field in record.directory:
            field_key = str(int(field.tag))  # remove leading zeroes
            field_occurrences = fields.setdefault(field_key, [])
            content = field.value.decode(INPUT_ENCODING, 'replace')
            if isis_json_type == 1:
                field_occurrences.append(content)
            elif isis_json_type == 2:
                field_occurrences.append(expand(content))
            elif isis_json_type == 3:
                field_occurrences.append(dict(expand(content)))
            else:
                raise NotImplementedError('ISIS-JSON type %s conversion '
                    'not yet implemented for .iso input' % isis_json_type)

        yield fields
    iso.close()

def iter_mst_records(master_file_name, isis_json_type):
    try:
        from bruma.master import MasterFactory, Record
    except ImportError:
        print('IMPORT ERROR: Jython 2.5 and Bruma.jar '
              'are required to read .mst files')
        raise SystemExit
    mst = MasterFactory.getInstance(master_file_name).open()
    for record in mst:
        fields = {}
        if SKIP_INACTIVE:
            if record.getStatus() != Record.Status.ACTIVE:
                continue
        else:  # save status only there are non-active records
            fields[ISIS_ACTIVE_KEY] = (record.getStatus() ==
                                       Record.Status.ACTIVE)
        fields[ISIS_MFN_KEY] = record.getMfn()
        for field in record.getFields():
            field_key = str(field.getId())
            field_occurrences = fields.setdefault(field_key, [])
            if isis_json_type == 3:
                content = {}
                for subfield in field.getSubfields():
                    subfield_key = subfield.getId()
                    if subfield_key == '*':
                        content['_'] = subfield.getContent()
                    else:
                        subfield_occurrences = content.setdefault(subfield_key, [])
                        subfield_occurrences.append(subfield.getContent())
                field_occurrences.append(content)
            elif isis_json_type == 1:
                content = []
                for subfield in field.getSubfields():
                    subfield_key = subfield.getId()
                    if subfield_key == '*':
                        content.insert(0, subfield.getContent())
                    else:
                        content.append(SUBFIELD_DELIMITER + subfield_key +
                                       subfield.getContent())
                field_occurrences.append(''.join(content))
            else:
                raise NotImplementedError('ISIS-JSON type %s conversion '
                    'not yet implemented for .mst input' % isis_json_type)
        yield fields
    mst.close()

def write_json(input_gen, file_name, output, qty, skip, id_tag,
               gen_uuid, mongo, mfn, isis_json_type, prefix,
               constant):
    start = skip
    end = start + qty
    if id_tag:
        id_tag = str(id_tag)
        ids = set()
    else:
        id_tag = ''
    for i, record in enumerate(input_gen):
        if i >= end:
            break
        if not mongo:
            if i == 0:
                output.write('[')
            elif i > start:
                output.write(',')
        if start <= i < end:
            if id_tag:
                occurrences = record.get(id_tag, None)
                if occurrences is None:
                    msg = 'id tag #%s not found in record %s'
                    if ISIS_MFN_KEY in record:
                        msg = msg + (' (mfn=%s)' % record[ISIS_MFN_KEY])
                    raise KeyError(msg % (id_tag, i))
                if len(occurrences) > 1:
                    msg = 'multiple id tags #%s found in record %s'
                    if ISIS_MFN_KEY in record:
                        msg = msg + (' (mfn=%s)' % record[ISIS_MFN_KEY])
                    raise TypeError(msg % (id_tag, i))
                else:  # ok, we have one and only one id field
                    if isis_json_type == 1:
                        id = occurrences[0]
                    elif isis_json_type == 2:
                        id = occurrences[0][0][1]
                    elif isis_json_type == 3:
                        id = occurrences[0]['_']
                    if id in ids:
                        msg = 'duplicate id %s in tag #%s, record %s'
                        if ISIS_MFN_KEY in record:
                            msg = msg + (' (mfn=%s)' % record[ISIS_MFN_KEY])
                        raise TypeError(msg % (id, id_tag, i))
                    record['_id'] = id
                    ids.add(id)
            elif gen_uuid:
                record['_id'] = unicode(uuid4())
            elif mfn:
                record['_id'] = record[ISIS_MFN_KEY]
            if prefix:
                # iterate over a fixed sequence of tags
                for tag in tuple(record):
                    if str(tag).isdigit():
                        record[prefix+tag] = record[tag]
                        del record[tag]  # this is why we iterate over a tuple
                        # with the tags, and not directly on the record dict
            if constant:
                constant_key, constant_value = constant.split(':')
                record[constant_key] = constant_value
            output.write(json.dumps(record).encode('utf-8'))
            output.write('\n')
    if not mongo:
        output.write(']\n')

def main():
    # create the parser
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
        description='Convert an ISIS .mst or .iso file to a JSON array')

    # add the arguments
    parser.add_argument(
        'file_name', metavar='INPUT.(mst|iso)',
        help='.mst or .iso file to read')
    parser.add_argument(
        '-o', '--out', type=argparse.FileType('w'), default=sys.stdout,
        metavar='OUTPUT.json',
        help='the file where the JSON output should be written'
             ' (default: write to stdout)')
    parser.add_argument(
        '-c', '--couch', action='store_true',
        help='output array within a "docs" item in a JSON document'
             ' for bulk insert to CouchDB via POST to db/_bulk_docs')
    parser.add_argument(
        '-m', '--mongo', action='store_true',
        help='output individual records as separate JSON dictionaries, one'
             ' per line for bulk insert to MongoDB via mongoimport utility')
    parser.add_argument(
        '-t', '--type', type=int, metavar='ISIS_JSON_TYPE', default=1,
        help='ISIS-JSON type, sets field structure: 1=string, 2=alist,'
             ' 3=dict (default=1)')
    parser.add_argument(
        '-q', '--qty', type=int, default=DEFAULT_QTY,
        help='maximum quantity of records to read (default=ALL)')
    parser.add_argument(
        '-s', '--skip', type=int, default=0,
        help='records to skip from start of .mst (default=0)')
    parser.add_argument(
        '-i', '--id', type=int, metavar='TAG_NUMBER', default=0,
        help='generate an "_id" from the given unique TAG field number'
             ' for each record')
    parser.add_argument(
        '-u', '--uuid', action='store_true',
        help='generate an "_id" with a random UUID for each record')
    parser.add_argument(
        '-p', '--prefix', type=str, metavar='PREFIX', default='',
        help='concatenate prefix to every numeric field tag'
             ' (ex. 99 becomes "v99")')
    parser.add_argument(
        '-n', '--mfn', action='store_true',
        help='generate an "_id" from the MFN of each record'
             ' (available only for .mst input)')
    parser.add_argument(
        '-k', '--constant', type=str, metavar='TAG:VALUE', default='',
        help='Include a constant tag:value in every record (ex. -k type:AS)')

    '''
    # TODO: implement this to export large quantities of records to CouchDB
    parser.add_argument(
        '-r', '--repeat', type=int, default=1,
        help='repeat operation, saving multiple JSON files'
             ' (default=1, use -r 0 to repeat until end of input)')
    '''
    # parse the command line
    args = parser.parse_args()
    if args.file_name.lower().endswith('.mst'):
        input_gen_func = iter_mst_records
    else:
        if args.mfn:
            print('UNSUPORTED: -n/--mfn option only available for .mst input.')
            raise SystemExit
        input_gen_func = iter_iso_records
    input_gen = input_gen_func(args.file_name, args.type)
    if args.couch:
        args.out.write('{ "docs" : ')
    write_json(input_gen, args.file_name, args.out, args.qty,
               args.skip, args.id, args.uuid, args.mongo, args.mfn,
               args.type, args.prefix, args.constant)
    if args.couch:
        args.out.write('}\n')
    args.out.close()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

iter_iso_records generator function reads .iso file, yields records.

iter_mst_records generator function reads .mst file, yields records.

write_json iterates over input_gen generator and outputs the .json file.

Main function reads command-line arguments then…

…selects iter_iso_records or…

…iter_mst_records depending on input file extension.

A generator object is built from the selected generator function.

write_json is called with the generator as the first argument.

Chapter 16: Taxi Fleet Discrete Event Simulation

Example A-6 is the full listing for taxi_sim.py discussed in “The Taxi Fleet Simulation”.

Example A-6. taxi_sim.py: the taxi fleet simulator

"""
Taxi simulator
==============

Driving a taxi from the console::

    >>> from taxi_sim import taxi_process
    >>> taxi = taxi_process(ident=13, trips=2, start_time=0)
    >>> next(taxi)
    Event(time=0, proc=13, action='leave garage')
    >>> taxi.send(_.time + 7)
    Event(time=7, proc=13, action='pick up passenger')
    >>> taxi.send(_.time + 23)
    Event(time=30, proc=13, action='drop off passenger')
    >>> taxi.send(_.time + 5)
    Event(time=35, proc=13, action='pick up passenger')
    >>> taxi.send(_.time + 48)
    Event(time=83, proc=13, action='drop off passenger')
    >>> taxi.send(_.time + 1)
    Event(time=84, proc=13, action='going home')
    >>> taxi.send(_.time + 10)
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    StopIteration

Sample run with two cars, random seed 10. This is a valid doctest::

    >>> main(num_taxis=2, seed=10)
    taxi: 0  Event(time=0, proc=0, action='leave garage')
    taxi: 0  Event(time=5, proc=0, action='pick up passenger')
    taxi: 1     Event(time=5, proc=1, action='leave garage')
    taxi: 1     Event(time=10, proc=1, action='pick up passenger')
    taxi: 1     Event(time=15, proc=1, action='drop off passenger')
    taxi: 0  Event(time=17, proc=0, action='drop off passenger')
    taxi: 1     Event(time=24, proc=1, action='pick up passenger')
    taxi: 0  Event(time=26, proc=0, action='pick up passenger')
    taxi: 0  Event(time=30, proc=0, action='drop off passenger')
    taxi: 0  Event(time=34, proc=0, action='going home')
    taxi: 1     Event(time=46, proc=1, action='drop off passenger')
    taxi: 1     Event(time=48, proc=1, action='pick up passenger')
    taxi: 1     Event(time=110, proc=1, action='drop off passenger')
    taxi: 1     Event(time=139, proc=1, action='pick up passenger')
    taxi: 1     Event(time=140, proc=1, action='drop off passenger')
    taxi: 1     Event(time=150, proc=1, action='going home')
    *** end of events ***

See longer sample run at the end of this module.

"""

import random
import collections
import queue
import argparse
import time

DEFAULT_NUMBER_OF_TAXIS = 3
DEFAULT_END_TIME = 180
SEARCH_DURATION = 5
TRIP_DURATION = 20
DEPARTURE_INTERVAL = 5

Event = collections.namedtuple('Event', 'time proc action')

# BEGIN TAXI_PROCESS
def taxi_process(ident, trips, start_time=0):
    """Yield to simulator issuing event at each state change"""
    time = yield Event(start_time, ident, 'leave garage')
    for i in range(trips):
        time = yield Event(time, ident, 'pick up passenger')
        time = yield Event(time, ident, 'drop off passenger')

    yield Event(time, ident, 'going home')
    # end of taxi process
# END TAXI_PROCESS

# BEGIN TAXI_SIMULATOR
class Simulator:

    def __init__(self, procs_map):
        self.events = queue.PriorityQueue()
        self.procs = dict(procs_map)

    def run(self, end_time):
        """Schedule and display events until time is up"""
        # schedule the first event for each cab
        for _, proc in sorted(self.procs.items()):
            first_event = next(proc)
            self.events.put(first_event)

        # main loop of the simulation
        sim_time = 0
        while sim_time < end_time:
            if self.events.empty():
                print('*** end of events ***')
                break

            current_event = self.events.get()
            sim_time, proc_id, previous_action = current_event
            print('taxi:', proc_id, proc_id * '   ', current_event)
            active_proc = self.procs[proc_id]
            next_time = sim_time + compute_duration(previous_action)
            try:
                next_event = active_proc.send(next_time)
            except StopIteration:
                del self.procs[proc_id]
            else:
                self.events.put(next_event)
        else:
            msg = '*** end of simulation time: {} events pending ***'
            print(msg.format(self.events.qsize()))
# END TAXI_SIMULATOR

def compute_duration(previous_action):
    """Compute action duration using exponential distribution"""
    if previous_action in ['leave garage', 'drop off passenger']:
        # new state is prowling
        interval = SEARCH_DURATION
    elif previous_action == 'pick up passenger':
        # new state is trip
        interval = TRIP_DURATION
    elif previous_action == 'going home':
        interval = 1
    else:
        raise ValueError('Unknown previous_action: %s' % previous_action)
    return int(random.expovariate(1/interval)) + 1

def main(end_time=DEFAULT_END_TIME, num_taxis=DEFAULT_NUMBER_OF_TAXIS,
         seed=None):
    """Initialize random generator, build procs and run simulation"""
    if seed is not None:
        random.seed(seed)  # get reproducible results

    taxis = {i: taxi_process(i, (i+1)*2, i*DEPARTURE_INTERVAL)
             for i in range(num_taxis)}
    sim = Simulator(taxis)
    sim.run(end_time)

if __name__ == '__main__':

    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
                        description='Taxi fleet simulator.')
    parser.add_argument('-e', '--end-time', type=int,
                        default=DEFAULT_END_TIME,
                        help='simulation end time; default = %s'
                        % DEFAULT_END_TIME)
    parser.add_argument('-t', '--taxis', type=int,
                        default=DEFAULT_NUMBER_OF_TAXIS,
                        help='number of taxis running; default = %s'
                        % DEFAULT_NUMBER_OF_TAXIS)
    parser.add_argument('-s', '--seed', type=int, default=None,
                        help='random generator seed (for testing)')

    args = parser.parse_args()
    main(args.end_time, args.taxis, args.seed)

"""

Sample run from the command line, seed=3, maximum elapsed time=120::

# BEGIN TAXI_SAMPLE_RUN
$ python3 taxi_sim.py -s 3 -e 120
taxi: 0  Event(time=0, proc=0, action='leave garage')
taxi: 0  Event(time=2, proc=0, action='pick up passenger')
taxi: 1     Event(time=5, proc=1, action='leave garage')
taxi: 1     Event(time=8, proc=1, action='pick up passenger')
taxi: 2        Event(time=10, proc=2, action='leave garage')
taxi: 2        Event(time=15, proc=2, action='pick up passenger')
taxi: 2        Event(time=17, proc=2, action='drop off passenger')
taxi: 0  Event(time=18, proc=0, action='drop off passenger')
taxi: 2        Event(time=18, proc=2, action='pick up passenger')
taxi: 2        Event(time=25, proc=2, action='drop off passenger')
taxi: 1     Event(time=27, proc=1, action='drop off passenger')
taxi: 2        Event(time=27, proc=2, action='pick up passenger')
taxi: 0  Event(time=28, proc=0, action='pick up passenger')
taxi: 2        Event(time=40, proc=2, action='drop off passenger')
taxi: 2        Event(time=44, proc=2, action='pick up passenger')
taxi: 1     Event(time=55, proc=1, action='pick up passenger')
taxi: 1     Event(time=59, proc=1, action='drop off passenger')
taxi: 0  Event(time=65, proc=0, action='drop off passenger')
taxi: 1     Event(time=65, proc=1, action='pick up passenger')
taxi: 2        Event(time=65, proc=2, action='drop off passenger')
taxi: 2        Event(time=72, proc=2, action='pick up passenger')
taxi: 0  Event(time=76, proc=0, action='going home')
taxi: 1     Event(time=80, proc=1, action='drop off passenger')
taxi: 1     Event(time=88, proc=1, action='pick up passenger')
taxi: 2        Event(time=95, proc=2, action='drop off passenger')
taxi: 2        Event(time=97, proc=2, action='pick up passenger')
taxi: 2        Event(time=98, proc=2, action='drop off passenger')
taxi: 1     Event(time=106, proc=1, action='drop off passenger')
taxi: 2        Event(time=109, proc=2, action='going home')
taxi: 1     Event(time=110, proc=1, action='going home')
*** end of events ***
# END TAXI_SAMPLE_RUN

"""

Chapter 17: Cryptographic Examples

These scripts were used to show the use of futures.ProcessPoolExecutor to run CPU-intensive tasks.

Example A-7 encrypts and decrypts random byte arrays with the RC4 algorithm. It depends on the arcfour.py module (Example A-8) to run.

Example A-7. arcfour_futures.py: futures.ProcessPoolExecutor example

import sys
import time
from concurrent import futures
from random import randrange
from arcfour import arcfour

JOBS = 12
SIZE = 2**18

KEY = b"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves\nDid gyre"
STATUS = '{} workers, elapsed time: {:.2f}s'

def arcfour_test(size, key):
    in_text = bytearray(randrange(256) for i in range(size))
    cypher_text = arcfour(key, in_text)
    out_text = arcfour(key, cypher_text)
    assert in_text == out_text, 'Failed arcfour_test'
    return size

def main(workers=None):
    if workers:
        workers = int(workers)
    t0 = time.time()

    with futures.ProcessPoolExecutor(workers) as executor:
        actual_workers = executor._max_workers
        to_do = []
        for i in range(JOBS, 0, -1):
            size = SIZE + int(SIZE / JOBS * (i - JOBS/2))
            job = executor.submit(arcfour_test, size, KEY)
            to_do.append(job)

        for future in futures.as_completed(to_do):
            res = future.result()
            print('{:.1f} KB'.format(res/2**10))

    print(STATUS.format(actual_workers, time.time() - t0))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    if len(sys.argv) == 2:
        workers = int(sys.argv[1])
    else:
        workers = None
    main(workers)

Example A-8 implements the RC4 encryption algorithm in pure Python.

Example A-8. arcfour.py: RC4 compatible algorithm

"""RC4 compatible algorithm"""

def arcfour(key, in_bytes, loops=20):

    kbox = bytearray(256)  # create key box
    for i, car in enumerate(key):  # copy key and vector
        kbox[i] = car
    j = len(key)
    for i in range(j, 256):  # repeat until full
        kbox[i] = kbox[i-j]

    # [1] initialize sbox
    sbox = bytearray(range(256))

    # repeat sbox mixing loop, as recommened in CipherSaber-2
    # http://ciphersaber.gurus.com/faq.html#cs2
    j = 0
    for k in range(loops):
        for i in range(256):
            j = (j + sbox[i] + kbox[i]) % 256
            sbox[i], sbox[j] = sbox[j], sbox[i]

    # main loop
    i = 0
    j = 0
    out_bytes = bytearray()

    for car in in_bytes:
        i = (i + 1) % 256
        # [2] shuffle sbox
        j = (j + sbox[i]) % 256
        sbox[i], sbox[j] = sbox[j], sbox[i]
        # [3] compute t
        t = (sbox[i] + sbox[j]) % 256
        k = sbox[t]
        car = car ^ k
        out_bytes.append(car)

    return out_bytes

def test():
    from time import time
    clear = bytearray(b'1234567890' * 100000)
    t0 = time()
    cipher = arcfour(b'key', clear)
    print('elapsed time: %.2fs' % (time() - t0))
    result = arcfour(b'key', cipher)
    assert result == clear, '%r != %r' % (result, clear)
    print('elapsed time: %.2fs' % (time() - t0))
    print('OK')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    test()

Example A-9 applies the SHA-256 hash algorithm to random byte arrays. It uses hashlib from the standard library, which in turn uses the OpenSSL library written in C.

Example A-9. sha_futures.py: futures.ProcessPoolExecutor example

import sys
import time
import hashlib
from concurrent import futures
from random import randrange

JOBS = 12
SIZE = 2**20
STATUS = '{} workers, elapsed time: {:.2f}s'

def sha(size):
    data = bytearray(randrange(256) for i in range(size))
    algo = hashlib.new('sha256')
    algo.update(data)
    return algo.hexdigest()

def main(workers=None):
    if workers:
        workers = int(workers)
    t0 = time.time()

    with futures.ProcessPoolExecutor(workers) as executor:
        actual_workers = executor._max_workers
        to_do = (executor.submit(sha, SIZE) for i in range(JOBS))
        for future in futures.as_completed(to_do):
            res = future.result()
            print(res)

    print(STATUS.format(actual_workers, time.time() - t0))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    if len(sys.argv) == 2:
        workers = int(sys.argv[1])
    else:
        workers = None
    main(workers)

Chapter 17: flags2 HTTP Client Examples

All flags2 examples from “Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling” use functions from the flags2_common.py module (Example A-10).

Example A-10. flags2_common.py

"""Utilities for second set of flag examples.
"""

import os
import time
import sys
import string
import argparse
from collections import namedtuple
from enum import Enum

Result = namedtuple('Result', 'status data')

HTTPStatus = Enum('Status', 'ok not_found error')

POP20_CC = ('CN IN US ID BR PK NG BD RU JP '
            'MX PH VN ET EG DE IR TR CD FR').split()

DEFAULT_CONCUR_REQ = 1
MAX_CONCUR_REQ = 1

SERVERS = {
    'REMOTE': 'http://flupy.org/data/flags',
    'LOCAL':  'http://localhost:8001/flags',
    'DELAY':  'http://localhost:8002/flags',
    'ERROR':  'http://localhost:8003/flags',
}
DEFAULT_SERVER = 'LOCAL'

DEST_DIR = 'downloads/'
COUNTRY_CODES_FILE = 'country_codes.txt'

def save_flag(img, filename):
    path = os.path.join(DEST_DIR, filename)
    with open(path, 'wb') as fp:
        fp.write(img)

def initial_report(cc_list, actual_req, server_label):
    if len(cc_list) <= 10:
        cc_msg = ', '.join(cc_list)
    else:
        cc_msg = 'from {} to {}'.format(cc_list[0], cc_list[-1])
    print('{} site: {}'.format(server_label, SERVERS[server_label]))
    msg = 'Searching for {} flag{}: {}'
    plural = 's' if len(cc_list) != 1 else ''
    print(msg.format(len(cc_list), plural, cc_msg))
    plural = 's' if actual_req != 1 else ''
    msg = '{} concurrent connection{} will be used.'
    print(msg.format(actual_req, plural))

def final_report(cc_list, counter, start_time):
    elapsed = time.time() - start_time
    print('-' * 20)
    msg = '{} flag{} downloaded.'
    plural = 's' if counter[HTTPStatus.ok] != 1 else ''
    print(msg.format(counter[HTTPStatus.ok], plural))
    if counter[HTTPStatus.not_found]:
        print(counter[HTTPStatus.not_found], 'not found.')
    if counter[HTTPStatus.error]:
        plural = 's' if counter[HTTPStatus.error] != 1 else ''
        print('{} error{}.'.format(counter[HTTPStatus.error], plural))
    print('Elapsed time: {:.2f}s'.format(elapsed))

def expand_cc_args(every_cc, all_cc, cc_args, limit):
    codes = set()
    A_Z = string.ascii_uppercase
    if every_cc:
        codes.update(a+b for a in A_Z for b in A_Z)
    elif all_cc:
        with open(COUNTRY_CODES_FILE) as fp:
            text = fp.read()
        codes.update(text.split())
    else:
        for cc in (c.upper() for c in cc_args):
            if len(cc) == 1 and cc in A_Z:
                codes.update(cc+c for c in A_Z)
            elif len(cc) == 2 and all(c in A_Z for c in cc):
                codes.add(cc)
            else:
                msg = 'each CC argument must be A to Z or AA to ZZ.'
                raise ValueError('*** Usage error: '+msg)
    return sorted(codes)[:limit]

def process_args(default_concur_req):
    server_options = ', '.join(sorted(SERVERS))
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
                description='Download flags for country codes. '
                'Default: top 20 countries by population.')
    parser.add_argument('cc', metavar='CC', nargs='*',
                help='country code or 1st letter (eg. B for BA...BZ)')
    parser.add_argument('-a', '--all', action='store_true',
                help='get all available flags (AD to ZW)')
    parser.add_argument('-e', '--every', action='store_true',
                help='get flags for every possible code (AA...ZZ)')
    parser.add_argument('-l', '--limit', metavar='N', type=int,
                help='limit to N first codes', default=sys.maxsize)
    parser.add_argument('-m', '--max_req', metavar='CONCURRENT', type=int,
                default=default_concur_req,
                help='maximum concurrent requests (default={})'
                      .format(default_concur_req))
    parser.add_argument('-s', '--server', metavar='LABEL',
                default=DEFAULT_SERVER,
                help='Server to hit; one of {} (default={})'
                      .format(server_options, DEFAULT_SERVER))
    parser.add_argument('-v', '--verbose', action='store_true',
                help='output detailed progress info')
    args = parser.parse_args()
    if args.max_req < 1:
        print('*** Usage error: --max_req CONCURRENT must be >= 1')
        parser.print_usage()
        sys.exit(1)
    if args.limit < 1:
        print('*** Usage error: --limit N must be >= 1')
        parser.print_usage()
        sys.exit(1)
    args.server = args.server.upper()
    if args.server not in SERVERS:
        print('*** Usage error: --server LABEL must be one of',
              server_options)
        parser.print_usage()
        sys.exit(1)
    try:
        cc_list = expand_cc_args(args.every, args.all, args.cc, args.limit)
    except ValueError as exc:
        print(exc.args[0])
        parser.print_usage()
        sys.exit(1)

    if not cc_list:
        cc_list = sorted(POP20_CC)
    return args, cc_list

def main(download_many, default_concur_req, max_concur_req):
    args, cc_list = process_args(default_concur_req)
    actual_req = min(args.max_req, max_concur_req, len(cc_list))
    initial_report(cc_list, actual_req, args.server)
    base_url = SERVERS[args.server]
    t0 = time.time()
    counter = download_many(cc_list, base_url, args.verbose, actual_req)
    assert sum(counter.values()) == len(cc_list), \
        'some downloads are unaccounted for'
    final_report(cc_list, counter, t0)

The flags2_sequential.py script (Example A-11) is the baseline for comparison with the concurrent implementations. flags2_threadpool.py (Example 17-14) also uses the get_flag and download_one functions from flags2_sequential.py.

Example A-11. flags2_sequential.py

"""Download flags of countries (with error handling).

Sequential version

Sample run::

    $ python3 flags2_sequential.py -s DELAY b
    DELAY site: http://localhost:8002/flags
    Searching for 26 flags: from BA to BZ
    1 concurrent connection will be used.
    --------------------
    17 flags downloaded.
    9 not found.
    Elapsed time: 13.36s

"""

import collections

import requests
import tqdm

from flags2_common import main, save_flag, HTTPStatus, Result

DEFAULT_CONCUR_REQ = 1
MAX_CONCUR_REQ = 1

# BEGIN FLAGS2_BASIC_HTTP_FUNCTIONS
def get_flag(base_url, cc):
    url = '{}/{cc}/{cc}.gif'.format(base_url, cc=cc.lower())
    resp = requests.get(url)
    if resp.status_code != 200:
        resp.raise_for_status()
    return resp.content

def download_one(cc, base_url, verbose=False):
    try:
        image = get_flag(base_url, cc)
    except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as exc:
        res = exc.response
        if res.status_code == 404:
            status = HTTPStatus.not_found
            msg = 'not found'
        else:
            raise
    else:
        save_flag(image, cc.lower() + '.gif')
        status = HTTPStatus.ok
        msg = 'OK'

    if verbose:
        print(cc, msg)

    return Result(status, cc)
# END FLAGS2_BASIC_HTTP_FUNCTIONS

# BEGIN FLAGS2_DOWNLOAD_MANY_SEQUENTIAL
def download_many(cc_list, base_url, verbose, max_req):
    counter = collections.Counter()
    cc_iter = sorted(cc_list)
    if not verbose:
        cc_iter = tqdm.tqdm(cc_iter)
    for cc in cc_iter:
        try:
            res = download_one(cc, base_url, verbose)
        except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as exc:
            error_msg = 'HTTP error {res.status_code} - {res.reason}'
            error_msg = error_msg.format(res=exc.response)
        except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError as exc:
            error_msg = 'Connection error'
        else:
            error_msg = ''
            status = res.status

        if error_msg:
            status = HTTPStatus.error
        counter[status] += 1
        if verbose and error_msg:
            print('*** Error for {}: {}'.format(cc, error_msg))

    return counter
# END FLAGS2_DOWNLOAD_MANY_SEQUENTIAL

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main(download_many, DEFAULT_CONCUR_REQ, MAX_CONCUR_REQ)

Chapter 19: OSCON Schedule Scripts and Tests

Example A-12 is the test script for the schedule1.py module (Example 19-9). It uses the py.test library and test runner.

Example A-12. test_schedule1.py

import shelve
import pytest

import schedule1 as schedule

@pytest.yield_fixture
def db():
    with shelve.open(schedule.DB_NAME) as the_db:
        if schedule.CONFERENCE not in the_db:
            schedule.load_db(the_db)
        yield the_db

def test_record_class():
    rec = schedule.Record(spam=99, eggs=12)
    assert rec.spam == 99
    assert rec.eggs == 12

def test_conference_record(db):
    assert schedule.CONFERENCE in db

def test_speaker_record(db):
    speaker = db['speaker.3471']
    assert speaker.name == 'Anna Martelli Ravenscroft'

def test_event_record(db):
    event = db['event.33950']
    assert event.name == 'There *Will* Be Bugs'

def test_event_venue(db):
    event = db['event.33950']
    assert event.venue_serial == 1449

Example A-13 is the full listing of the schedule2.py example presented in “Linked Record Retrieval with Properties” in four parts.

Example A-13. schedule2.py

"""
schedule2.py: traversing OSCON schedule data

    >>> import shelve
    >>> db = shelve.open(DB_NAME)
    >>> if CONFERENCE not in db: load_db(db)

# BEGIN SCHEDULE2_DEMO

    >>> DbRecord.set_db(db)
    >>> event = DbRecord.fetch('event.33950')
    >>> event
    <Event 'There *Will* Be Bugs'>
    >>> event.venue
    <DbRecord serial='venue.1449'>
    >>> event.venue.name
    'Portland 251'
    >>> for spkr in event.speakers:
    ...     print('{0.serial}: {0.name}'.format(spkr))
    ...
    speaker.3471: Anna Martelli Ravenscroft
    speaker.5199: Alex Martelli

# END SCHEDULE2_DEMO

    >>> db.close()

"""

# BEGIN SCHEDULE2_RECORD
import warnings
import inspect

import osconfeed

DB_NAME = 'data/schedule2_db'
CONFERENCE = 'conference.115'

class Record:
    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        self.__dict__.update(kwargs)

    def __eq__(self, other):
        if isinstance(other, Record):
            return self.__dict__ == other.__dict__
        else:
            return NotImplemented
# END SCHEDULE2_RECORD

# BEGIN SCHEDULE2_DBRECORD
class MissingDatabaseError(RuntimeError):
    """Raised when a database is required but was not set."""

class DbRecord(Record):

    __db = None

    @staticmethod
    def set_db(db):
        DbRecord.__db = db

    @staticmethod
    def get_db():
        return DbRecord.__db

    @classmethod
    def fetch(cls, ident):
        db = cls.get_db()
        try:
            return db[ident]
        except TypeError:
            if db is None:
                msg = "database not set; call '{}.set_db(my_db)'"
                raise MissingDatabaseError(msg.format(cls.__name__))
            else:
                raise

    def __repr__(self):
        if hasattr(self, 'serial'):
            cls_name = self.__class__.__name__
            return '<{} serial={!r}>'.format(cls_name, self.serial)
        else:
            return super().__repr__()
# END SCHEDULE2_DBRECORD

# BEGIN SCHEDULE2_EVENT
class Event(DbRecord):

    @property
    def venue(self):
        key = 'venue.{}'.format(self.venue_serial)
        return self.__class__.fetch(key)

    @property
    def speakers(self):
        if not hasattr(self, '_speaker_objs'):
            spkr_serials = self.__dict__['speakers']
            fetch = self.__class__.fetch
            self._speaker_objs = [fetch('speaker.{}'.format(key))
                                  for key in spkr_serials]
        return self._speaker_objs

    def __repr__(self):
        if hasattr(self, 'name'):
            cls_name = self.__class__.__name__
            return '<{} {!r}>'.format(cls_name, self.name)
        else:
            return super().__repr__()
# END SCHEDULE2_EVENT

# BEGIN SCHEDULE2_LOAD
def load_db(db):
    raw_data = osconfeed.load()
    warnings.warn('loading ' + DB_NAME)
    for collection, rec_list in raw_data['Schedule'].items():
        record_type = collection[:-1]
        cls_name = record_type.capitalize()
        cls = globals().get(cls_name, DbRecord)
        if inspect.isclass(cls) and issubclass(cls, DbRecord):
            factory = cls
        else:
            factory = DbRecord
        for record in rec_list:
            key = '{}.{}'.format(record_type, record['serial'])
            record['serial'] = key
            db[key] = factory(**record)
# END SCHEDULE2_LOAD

Example A-14 was used to test Example A-13 with py.test.

Example A-14. test_schedule2.py

import shelve
import pytest

import schedule2 as schedule

@pytest.yield_fixture
def db():
    with shelve.open(schedule.DB_NAME) as the_db:
        if schedule.CONFERENCE not in the_db:
            schedule.load_db(the_db)
        yield the_db

def test_record_attr_access():
    rec = schedule.Record(spam=99, eggs=12)
    assert rec.spam == 99
    assert rec.eggs == 12

def test_record_repr():
    rec = schedule.DbRecord(spam=99, eggs=12)
    assert 'DbRecord object at 0x' in repr(rec)
    rec2 = schedule.DbRecord(serial=13)
    assert repr(rec2) == "<DbRecord serial=13>"

def test_conference_record(db):
    assert schedule.CONFERENCE in db

def test_speaker_record(db):
    speaker = db['speaker.3471']
    assert speaker.name == 'Anna Martelli Ravenscroft'

def test_missing_db_exception():
    with pytest.raises(schedule.MissingDatabaseError):
        schedule.DbRecord.fetch('venue.1585')

def test_dbrecord(db):
    schedule.DbRecord.set_db(db)
    venue = schedule.DbRecord.fetch('venue.1585')
    assert venue.name == 'Exhibit Hall B'

def test_event_record(db):
    event = db['event.33950']
    assert repr(event) == "<Event 'There *Will* Be Bugs'>"

def test_event_venue(db):
    schedule.Event.set_db(db)
    event = db['event.33950']
    assert event.venue_serial == 1449
    assert event.venue == db['venue.1449']
    assert event.venue.name == 'Portland 251'

def test_event_speakers(db):
    schedule.Event.set_db(db)
    event = db['event.33950']
    assert len(event.speakers) == 2
    anna_and_alex = [db['speaker.3471'], db['speaker.5199']]
    assert event.speakers == anna_and_alex

def test_event_no_speakers(db):
    schedule.Event.set_db(db)
    event = db['event.36848']
    assert len(event.speakers) == 0

Python Jargon

Many terms here are not exclusive to Python, of course, but particularly in the definitions you may find meanings that are specific to the Python community.

Also see the official Python glossary.

ABC (programming language)

A programming language created by Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertens, and Steven Pemberton. Guido van Rossum, who developed Python, worked as a programmer implementing the ABC environment in the 1980s. Block structuring by indentation, built-in tuples and dictionaries, tuple unpacking, the semantics of the for loop, and uniform handling of all sequence types are some of the distinctive characteristics of Python that came from ABC.

Abstract base class (ABC)

A class that cannot be instantiated, only subclassed. ABCs are how interfaces are formalized in Python. Instead of inheriting from an ABC, a class may also declare that it fulfills the interface by registering with the ABC to become a virtual subclass.

accessor

A method implemented to provide access to a single data attribute. Some authors use accessor as a generic term encompassing getter and setter methods, others use it to refer only to getters, referring to setters as mutators.

aliasing

Assigning two or more names to the same object. For example, in a = []; b = a the variables a and b are aliases for the same list object. Aliasing happens naturally all the time in any language where variables store references to objects. To avoid confusion, just forget the idea that variables are boxes that hold objects (an object can’t be in two boxes at the same time). It’s better to think of them as labels attached to objects (an object can have more than one label).

argument

An expression passed to a function when it is called. In Pythonic parlance, argument and parameter are almost always synonyms. See parameter for more about the distinction and usage of these terms.

attribute

Methods and data attributes (i.e., “fields” in Java terms) are all known as attributes in Python. A method is just an attribute that happens to be a callable object (usually a function, but not necessarily).

BDFL

Benevolent Dictator For Life, alias for Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python language.

binary sequence

Generic term for sequence types with byte elements. The built-in binary sequence types are byte, bytearray, and memoryview.

BOM

Byte Order Mark, a sequence of bytes that may be present at the start of a UTF-16 encoded file. A BOM is the character U+FEFF (ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE) encoded to produce either b'\xfe\xff' on a big-endian CPU, or b'\xff\xfe' on a little-endian one. Because there is no U+FFFE characer in Unicode, the presence of these bytes unambiguously reveals the byte ordering used in the encoding. Although redundant, a BOM encoded as b'\xef\xbb\xbf' may be found in UTF-8 files.

bound method

A method that is accessed through an instance becomes bound to that instance. Any method is actually a descriptor and when accessed, it returns itself wrapped in an object that binds the method to the instance. That object is the bound method. It can be invoked without passing the value of self. For example, given the assignment my_method = my_obj.method, the bound method can later be called as my_method(). Contrast with unbound method.

built-in function (BIF)

A function bundled with the Python interpreter, coded in the underlying implementation language (i.e., C for CPython; Java for Jython, and so on). The term often refers only to the functions that don’t need to be imported, documented in Chapter 2, “Built-in Functions,” of The Python Standard Library Reference. But built-in modules like sys, math, re, etc. also contain built-in functions.

byte string

An unfortunate name still used to refer to bytes or bytearray in Python 3. In Python 2, the str type was really a byte string, and the term made sense to distinguish str from unicode strings. In Python 3, it makes no sense to insist on this term, and I tried to use byte sequence whenever I needed to talk in general about…byte sequences.

bytes-like object

A generic sequence of bytes. The most common bytes-like types are bytes, bytearray, and memoryview but other objects supporting the low-level CPython buffer protocol also qualify, if their elements are single bytes.

callable object

An object that can be invoked with the call operator (), to return a result or to perform some action. There are seven flavors of callable objects in Python: user-defined functions, built-in functions, built-in methods, instance methods, generator functions, classes, and instances of classes that implement the __call__ special method.

CamelCase

The convention of writing identifiers by joining words with uppercased initials (e.g., ConnectionRefusedError). PEP-8 recommends class names should be written in CamelCase, but the advice is not followed by the Python standard library. See snake_case.

Cheese Shop

Original name of the Python Package Index (PyPI), after the Monty Python skit about a cheese shop where nothing is available. As of this writing, the alias https://cheeseshop.python.org still works. See PyPI.

class

A program construct defining a new type, with data attributes and methods specifying possible operations on them. See type.

code point

An integer in the range 0 to 0x10FFFF used to identify an entry in the Unicode character database. As of Unicode 7.0, less than 3% of all code points are assigned to characters. In the Python documentation, the term may be spelled as one or two words. For example, in Chapter 2, “Built-in Functions,” of the Python Library Reference, the chr function is said to take an integer “codepoint,” while its inverse, ord, is described as returning a “Unicode code point.”

code smell

A coding pattern that suggests there may be something wrong with the design of a program. For example, excessive use of isinstance checks against concrete classes is a code smell, as it makes the program harder to extend to deal with new types in the future.

codec

(encoder/decoder) A module with functions to encode and decode, usually from str to bytes and back, although Python has a few codecs that perform bytes to bytes and str to str transformations.

collection

Generic term for data structures made of items that can be accessed individually. Some collections can contain objects of arbitrary types (see container) and others only objects of a single atomic type (see flat sequence). list and bytes are both collections, but list is a container, and bytes is a flat sequence.

considered harmful

Edsger Dijkstra’s letter titled “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” established a formula for titles of essays criticizing some computer science technique. Wikipedia’s “Considered harmful” article lists several examples, including "Considered Harmful Essays Considered Harmful” by Eric A. Meyer.

constructor

Informally, the __init__ instance method of a class is called its constructor, because its semantics is similar to that of a Java constructor. However, a fitting name for __init__ is initializer, as it does not actually build the instance, but receives it as its self argument. The constructor term better describes the __new__ class method, which Python calls before __init__, and is responsible for actually creating an instance and returning it. See initializer.

container

An object that holds references to other objects. Most collection types in Python are containers, but some are not. Contrast with flat sequence, which are collections but not containers.

context manager

An object implementing both the __enter__ and __exit__ special methods, for use in a with block.

coroutine

A generator used for concurrent programming by receiving values from a scheduler or an event loop via coro.send(value). The term may be used to describe the generator function or the generator object obtained by calling the generator function. See generator.

CPython

The standard Python interpreter, implemented in C. This term is only used when discussing implementation-specific behavior, or when talking about the multiple Python interpreters available, such as PyPy.

CRUD

Acronym for Create, Read, Update, and Delete, the four basic functions in any application that stores records.

decorator

A callable object A that returns another callable object B and is invoked in code using the syntax @A right before the definition of a callable C. When reading such code, the Python interpreter invokes A(C) and binds the resulting B to the variable previously assigned to C, effectively replacing the definition of C with B. If the target callable C is a function, then A is a function decorator; if C is a class, then A is a class decorator.

deep copy

A copy of an object in which all the objects that are attributes of the object are themselves also copied. Contrast with shallow copy.

descriptor

A class implementing one or more of the __get__, __set__, or __delete__ special methods becomes a descriptor when one of its instances is used as a class attribute of another class, the managed class. Descriptors manage the access and deletion of managed attributes in the managed class, often storing data in the managed instances.

docstring

Short for documentation string. When the first statement in a module, class, or function is a string literal, it is taken to be the docstring for the enclosing object, and the interpreter saves it as the __doc__ attribute of that object. See also doctest.

doctest

A module with functions to parse and run examples embedded in the docstrings of Python modules or in plain-text files. May also be used from the command line as:

python -m doctest
module_with_tests.py

DRY

Don’t Repeat Yourself—a software engineering principle stating that “Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.” It first appeared in the book The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas (Addison-Wesley, 1999).

duck typing

A form of polymorphism where functions operate on any object that implements the appropriate methods, regardless of their classes or explicit interface declarations.

dunder

Shortcut to pronounce the names of special methods and attributes that are written with leading and trailing double-underscores (i.e., __len__ is read as “dunder len”).

dunder method

See dunder and special methods.

EAFP

Acronym standing for the quote “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission,” attributed to computer pioneer Grace Hopper, and quoted by Pythonistas referring to dynamic programming practices like accessing attributes without testing first if they exist, and then catching the exception when that is the case. The docstring for the hasattr function actually says that it works “by calling getattr(object, name) and catching AttributeError.”

eager

An iterable object that builds all its items at once. In Python, a list comprehension is eager. Contrast with lazy.

fail-fast

A systems design approach recommending that errors should be reported as early as possible. Python adheres to this principle more closely than most dynamic languages. For example, there is no “undefined” value: variables referenced before initialization generate an error, and my_dict[k] raises an exception if k is missing (in contrast with JavaScript). As another example, parallel assignment via tuple unpacking in Python only works if every item is explicitly handled, while Ruby silently deals with item count mismatches by ignoring unused items on the right side of the =, or by assigning nil to extra variables on the left side.

falsy

Any value x for which bool(x) returns False; Python implicitly uses bool to evaluate objects in Boolean contexts, such as the expression controlling an if or while loop. The opposite of truthy.

file-like object

Used informally in the official documentation to refer to objects implementing the file protocol, with methods such as read, write, close, etc. Common variants are text files containing encoded strings with line-oriented reading and writing, StringIO instances which are in-memory text files, and binary files, containing unencoded bytes. The latter may be buffered or unbuffered. ABCs for the standard file types are defined in the io module since Python 2.6.

first-class function

Any function that is a first-class object in the language (i.e., can be created at runtime, assigned to variables, passed as an argument, and returned as the result of another function). Python functions are first-class functions.

flat sequence

A sequence type that physically stores the values of its items, and not references to other objects. The built-in types str, bytes, bytearray, memoryview, and array.array are flat sequences. Contrast with list, tuple, and collections.deque, which are container sequences. See container.

function

Strictly, an object resulting from evaluation of a def block or a lambda expression. Informally, the word function is used to describe any callable object, such as methods and even classes sometimes. The official Built-in Functions list includes several built-in classes like dict, range, and str. Also see callable object.

genexp

Short for generator expression.

generator

An iterator built with a generator function or a generator expression that may produce values without necessarily iterating over a collection; the canonical example is a generator to produce the Fibonacci series which, because it is infinite, would never fit in a collection. The term is sometimes used to describe a generator function, besides the object that results from calling it.

generator function

A function that has the yield keyword in its body. When invoked, a generator function returns a generator.

generator expression

An expression enclosed in parentheses using the same syntax of a list comprehension, but returning a generator instead of a list. A generator expression can be understood as a lazy version of a list comprehension. See lazy.

generic function

A group of functions designed to implement the same operation in customized ways for different object types. As of Python 3.4, the functools.singledispatch decorator is the standard way to create generic functions. This is known as multimethods in other languages.

GoF book

Alias for Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley, 1995), authored by the so-called Gang of Four (GoF): Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides.

hashable

An object is hashable if it has both __hash__ and __eq__ methods, with the constraints that the hash value must never change and if a == b then hash(a) == hash(b) must also be True. Most immutable built-in types are hashable, but a tuple is only hashable if every one of its items is also hashable.

higher-order function

A function that takes another function as argument, like sorted, map, and filter, or a function that returns a function as result, as Python decorators do.

idiom

“A manner of speaking that is natural to native speakers of a language,” according to the Princeton WordNet.

import time

The moment of initial execution of a module when its code is loaded by the Python interpreter, evaluated from top to bottom, and compiled into bytecode. This is when classes and functions are defined and become live objects. This is also when decorators are executed.

initializer

A better name for the __init__ method (instead of constructor). Initializing the instance received as self is the task of __init__. Actual instance construction is done by the __new__ method. See constructor.

iterable

Any object from which the iter built-in function can obtain an iterator. An iterable object works as the source of items in for loops, comprehensions, and tuple unpacking. Objects implementing an __iter__ method returning an iterator are iterable. Sequences are always iterable; other objects implementing a __getitem__ method may also be iterable.

iterable unpacking

A modern, more precise synonym for tuple unpacking. See also parallel assignment.

iterator

Any object that implements the __next__ no-argument method, which returns the next item in a series, or raises StopIteration when there are no more items. Python iterators also implement the __iter__ method so they are also iterable. Classic iterators, according to the original design pattern, return items from a collection. A generator is also an iterator, but it’s more flexible. See generator.

KISS principle

The acronym stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” This calls for seeking the simplest possible solution, with the fewest moving parts. The phrase was coined by Kelly Johnson, a highly accomplished aerospace engineer who worked in the real Area 51 designing some of the most advanced aircraft of the 20th century.

lazy

An iterable object that produces items on demand. In Python, generators are lazy. Contrast eager.

listcomp

Short for list comprehension.

list comprehension

An expression enclosed in brackets that uses the for and in keywords to build a list by processing and filtering the elements from one or more iterables. A list comprehension works eagerly. See eager.

liveness

An asynchronous, threaded, or distributed system exhibits the liveness property when “something good eventually happens” (i.e., even if some expected computation is not happening right now, it will be completed eventually). If a system deadlocks, it has lost its liveness.

magic method

Same as special method.

managed attribute

A public attribute managed by a descriptor object. Although the managed attribute is defined in the managed class, it operates like an instance attribute (i.e., it usually has a value per instance, held in a storage attribute). See descriptor.

managed class

A class that uses a descriptor object to manage one of its attributes. See descriptor.

managed instance

An instance of a managed class. See managed attribute and descriptor.

metaclass

A class whose instances are classes. By default, Python classes are instances of type, for example, type(int) is the class type, therefore type is a metaclass. User-defined metaclasses can be created by subclassing type.

metaprogramming

The practice of writing programs that use runtime information about themselves to change their behavior. For example, an ORM may introspect model class declarations to determine how to validate database record fields and convert database types to Python types.

monkey patching

Dynamically changing a module, class, or function at runtime, usually to add features or fix bugs. Because it is done in memory and not by changing the source code, a monkey patch only affects the currently running instance of the program. Monkey patches break encapsulation and tend to be tightly coupled to the implementation details of the patched code units, so they are seen as temporary workarounds and not a recommended technique for code integration.

mixin class

A class designed to be subclassed together with one or more additional classes in a multiple-inheritance class tree. A mixin class should never be instantiated, and a concrete subclass of a mixin class should also subclass another nonmixin class.

mixin method

A concrete method implementation provided in an ABC or in a mixin class.

mutator

See accessor.

name mangling

The automatic renaming of private attributes from __x to _MyClass__x, performed by the Python interpreter at runtime.

nonoverriding descriptor

A descriptor that does not implement __set__ and therefore does not interfere with setting of the managed attribute in the managed instance. Consequently, if a namesake attribute is set in the managed instance, it will shadow the descriptor in that instance. Also called nondata descriptor or shadowable descriptor. Contrast with overriding descriptor.

ORM

Object-Relational Mapper—an API that provides access to database tables and records as Python classes and objects, providing method calls to perform database operations. SQLAlchemy is a popular standalone Python ORM; the Django and Web2py frameworks have their own bundled ORMs.

overriding descriptor

A descriptor that implements __set__ and therefore intercepts and overrides attempts at setting the managed attribute in the managed instance. Also called data descriptor or enforced descriptor. Contrast with non-overriding descriptor.

parallel assignment

Assigning to several variables from items in an iterable, using syntax like a, b = [c, d]—also known as destructuring assignment. This is a common application of tuple unpacking.

parameter

Functions are declared with 0 or more “formal parameters,” which are unbound local variables. When the function is called, the arguments or “actual parameters” passed are bound to those variables. In this book, I tried to use argument to refer to an actual parameter passed to a function, and parameter for a formal parameter in the function declaration. However, that is not always feasible because the terms parameter and argument are used interchangeably all over the Python docs and API. See argument.

prime (verb)

Calling next(coro) on a coroutine to advance it to its first yield expression so that it becomes ready to receive values in succeeding coro.send(value) calls.

PyPI

The Python Package Index, where more than 60,000 packages are available, also known as the Cheese shop (see Cheese shop). PyPI is pronounced as “pie-P-eye” to avoid confusion with PyPy.

PyPy

An alternative implementation of the Python programming language using a toolchain that compiles a subset of Python to machine code, so the interpreter source code is actually written in Python. PyPy also includes a JIT to generate machine code for user programs on the fly—like the Java VM does. As of November 2014, PyPy is 6.8 times faster than CPython on average, according to published benchmarks. PyPy is pronounced as “pie-pie” to avoid confusion with PyPI.

Pythonic

Used to praise idiomatic Python code, that makes good use of language features to be concise, readable, and often faster as well. Also said of APIs that enable coding in a way that seems natural to proficient Python programmers. See idiom.

refcount

The reference counter that each CPython object keeps internally in order to determine when it can be destroyed by the garbage collector.

referent

The object that is the target of a reference. This term is most often used to discuss weak references.

REPL

Read-eval-print loop, an interactive console, like the standard python or alternatives like ipython, bpython, and Python Anywhere.

sequence

Generic name for any iterable data structure with a known size (e.g., len(s)) and allowing item access via 0-based integer indexes (e.g., s[0]). The word sequence has been part of the Python jargon from the start, but only with Python 2.6 was it formalized as an abstract class in collections.abc.Sequence.

serialization

Converting an object from its in-memory structure to a binary or text-oriented format for storage or transmission, in a way that allows the future reconstruction of a clone of the object on the same system or on a different one. The pickle module supports serialization of arbitrary Python objects to a binary format.

shallow copy

A copy of an object which shares references to all the objects that are attributes of the original object. Contrast with deep copy. Also see aliasing.

singleton

An object that is the only existing instance of a class—usually not by accident but because the class is designed to prevent creation of more than one instance. There is also a design pattern named Singleton, which is a recipe for coding such classes. The None object is a singleton in Python.

slicing

Producing a subset of a sequence by using the slice notation, e.g., my_sequence[2:6]. Slicing usually copies data to produce a new object; in particular, my_sequence[:] creates a shallow copy of the entire sequence. But a memoryview object can be sliced to produce a new memoryview that shares data with the original object.

snake_case

The convention of writing identifiers by joining words with the underscore character (_)—for example, run_until_complete. PEP-8 calls this style “lowercase with words separated by underscores” and recommends it for naming functions, methods, arguments, and variables. For packages, PEP-8 recommends concatenating words with no separators. The Python standard library has many examples of snake_case identifiers, but also many examples of identifiers with no separation between words (e.g., getattr, classmethod, isinstance, str.endswith, etc.). See CamelCase.

special method

A method with a special name such as __getitem__, spelled with leading and trailing double underscores. Almost all special methods recognized by Python are described in the “Data model” chapter of The Python Language Reference, but a few that are used only in specific contexts are documented in other parts of the documentation. For example, the __missing__ method of mappings is mentioned in “4.10. Mapping Types — dict" in The Python Standard Library.

storage attribute

An attribute in a managed instance used to store the value of an attribute managed by a descriptor. See also managed attribute.

strong reference

A reference that keeps an object alive in Python. Contrast with weak reference.

tuple unpacking

Assigning items from an iterable object to a tuple of variables (e.g., first, second, third == my_list). This is the usual term used by Pythonistas, but iterable unpacking is gaining traction.

truthy

Any value x for which bool(x) returns True; Python implicitly uses bool to evaluate objects in Boolean contexts, such as the expression controlling an if or while loop. The opposite of falsy.

type

Each specific category of program data, defined by a set of possible values and operations on them. Some Python types are close to machine data types (e.g., float and bytes) while others are extensions (e.g., int is not limited to CPU word size, str holds multibyte Unicode data points) and very high-level abstractions (e.g., dict, deque, etc.). Types may be user defined or built into the interpreter (a “built-in” type). Before the watershed type/class unification in Python 2.2, types and classes were different entities, and user-defined classes could not extend built-in types. Since then, built-in types and new-style classes became compatible, and a class is an instance of type. In Python 3 all classes are new-style classes. See class and metaclass.

unbound method

An instance method accessed directly on a class is not bound to an instance; therefore it’s said to be an “unbound method.” To succeed, a call to an unbound method must explicitly pass an instance of the class as the first argument. That instance will be assigned to the self argument in the method. See bound method.

uniform access principle

Bertrand Meyer, creator of the Eiffel Language, wrote: “All services offered by a module should be available through a uniform notation, which does not betray whether they are implemented through storage or through computation.” Properties and descriptors allow the implementation of the uniform access principle in Python. The lack of a new operator, making function calls and object instantiation look the same, is another form of this principle: the caller does not need to know whether the invoked object is a class, a function, or any other callable.

user-defined

Almost always in the Python docs the word user refers to you and I—programmers who use the Python language—as opposed to the developers who implement a Python interpreter. So the term “user-defined class” means a class written in Python, as opposed to built-in classes written in C, like str.

view

Python 3 views are special data structures returned by the dict methods .keys(), .values(), and .items(), providing a dynamic view into the dict keys and values without data duplication, which occurs in Python 2 where those methods return lists. All dict views are iterable and support the in operator. In addition, if the items referenced by the view are all hashable, then the view also implements the collections.abc.Set interface. This is the case for all views returned by the .keys() method, and for views returned by .items() when the values are also hashable.

virtual subclass

A class that does not inherit from a superclass but is registered using TheSuperClass.register(TheSubClass). See documentation for abc.ABCMeta.register.

wart

A misfeature of the language. Andrew Kuchling’s famous post “Python warts” has been acknowledged by the BDFL as influential in the decision to break backward-compatibility in the design of Python 3, as most of the failings could not be fixed otherwise. Many of Kuchling’s issues were fixed in Python 3.

weak reference

A special kind of object reference that does not increase the referent object reference count. Weak references are created with one of the functions and data structures in the weakref module.

YAGNI

“You Ain’t Gonna Need It,” a slogan to avoid implementing functionality that is not immediately necessary based on assumptions about future needs.

Zen of Python

Type import this into any Python console since version 2.2.

Index

Symbols

!= operator, Rich Comparison Operators

!r conversion field, String Representation

# operator, Why len Is Not a Method

% operator, String Representation

%r placeholder, String Representation

() (function invocation), Operator Overloading: Doing It Right

() (parentheses), List Comprehensions and Readability, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects

() call operator, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects

* operator, Emulating Numeric Types, Arithmetic Operators, Using * to grab excess items, Using + and * with Sequences, From Positional to Keyword-Only Parameters, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

** (double asterisk), From Positional to Keyword-Only Parameters

*= operator, Augmented Assignment with Sequences, Augmented Assignment Operators

*args, Using * to grab excess items

*extra, Further Reading

+ operator, Emulating Numeric Types, Arithmetic Operators, Using + and * with Sequences, Unary Operators, Overloading + for Vector Addition-Overloading + for Vector Addition

+= operator, Augmented Assignment with Sequences, Augmented Assignment Operators

+ELLIPSIS directive, A Pythonic Card Deck

+x, Unary Operators

. (attribute access), Operator Overloading: Doing It Right

.add_done_callback() method, Where Are the Futures?

.append method, Deques and Other Queues

.done() method, Where Are the Futures?

.frombytes method, An Alternative Constructor

.pop method, Deques and Other Queues

.result() method, Where Are the Futures?

2D vector addition, Emulating Numeric Types

404 errors (Not Found), Error Handling in the flags2 Examples

< operator, Rich Comparison Operators

<= operator, Rich Comparison Operators

== operator, Choosing Between == and is, Further Reading, Vector Take #4: Hashing and a Faster ==, Rich Comparison Operators

> operator, Rich Comparison Operators

>= operator, Rich Comparison Operators

@ operator, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

@abstractclassmethod, ABC Syntax Details

@abstractmethod, Defining and Using an ABC

@abstractproperty, ABC Syntax Details

@abstractstaticmethod, ABC Syntax Details

@asyncio.coroutine decorator, Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison, Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison

@classmethod decorator, Flexible Object Creation with __new__

@contextmanager decorator, The contextlib Utilities

@property decorator, Using a Property for Attribute Validation

[:] operator, Copies Are Shallow by Default

[] (square brackets), A Pythonic Card Deck, List Comprehensions and Readability, Multidimensional Slicing and Ellipsis, Operator Overloading: Doing It Right

\ (backslash), List Comprehensions and Readability

^ operator, A Hashable Vector2d, Vector Take #4: Hashing and a Faster ==

_ (underscore), Tuple Unpacking, Private and “Protected” Attributes in Python

__ (double underscore), The Python Data Model, The Python Data Model

__add__, Augmented Assignment with Sequences, Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture, Overloading + for Vector Addition, Augmented Assignment Operators

__bool__, Boolean Value of a Custom Type

__builtins__, Dictionaries and Sets

__bytes__, Object Representations

__call__, User-Defined Callable Types

__class__, Special Attributes that Affect Attribute Handling

__delattr__, Handling Attribute Deletion, Special Methods for Attribute Handling

__delete__, Attribute Descriptors

__del__, del and Garbage Collection

__dict__, Dictionaries and Sets, Function Introspection, Special Attributes that Affect Attribute Handling

__doc__, Treating a Function Like an Object, Function Introspection

__enter__, Context Managers and with Blocks

__eq__, Rich Comparison Operators

__exit__, Context Managers and with Blocks

__float__, A Hashable Vector2d

__format__, Object Representations, Formatted Displays, Vector Take #5: Formatting, Further Reading

__getattribute__, Special Methods for Attribute Handling

__getattr__, Vector Take #3: Dynamic Attribute Access, Special Methods for Attribute Handling

__getitem__, A Pythonic Card Deck, defaultdict: Another Take on Missing Keys, A Slice-Aware __getitem__, Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture, Python Digs Sequences

__get__, Attribute Descriptors

__hash__, Hashes and equality, A Hashable Vector2d, Vector Take #4: Hashing and a Faster ==

__iadd__, Augmented Assignment with Sequences, Augmented Assignment Operators

__imatmul__, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

__init__, Sentence Take #4: A Lazy Implementation, Flexible Object Creation with __new__, Metaclasses 101

__int__, A Hashable Vector2d

__invert__, Unary Operators

__iter__, Why Sequences Are Iterable: The iter Function, Iterables Versus Iterators, Sentence Take #2: A Classic Iterator

__len__, A Pythonic Card Deck, Why len Is Not a Method, A Slice-Aware __getitem__

__matmul__, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

__missing__, The __missing__ Method

__mro__, A Virtual Subclass of Tombola

__mul__, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

__neg__, Unary Operators

__new__, Flexible Object Creation with __new__, Further Reading

__next__, Iterables Versus Iterators, Making Sentence an Iterator: Bad Idea

__ne__, Rich Comparison Operators

__pos__, Unary Operators

__prepare__, The Metaclass __prepare__ Special Method

__radd__, Overloading + for Vector Addition

__repr__, String Representation

__rmatmul__, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

__rmul__, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

__ruml__, Arithmetic Operators

__self__, Special Methods for Attribute Handling

__setattr__, Special Methods for Attribute Handling

__setitem__, Monkey-Patching to Implement a Protocol at Runtime

__set__, Attribute Descriptors, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor

__slots__, Saving Space with the __slots__ Class Attribute, Special Attributes that Affect Attribute Handling, Chapter 9: RAM Usage With and Without __slots__

__str__, String Representation

__subclasshook__, Geese Can Behave as Ducks

{} (curly brackets), List Comprehensions and Readability

~ operator, Unary Operators

– operator, Unary Operators

… (ellipsis), Multidimensional Slicing and Ellipsis, Vector Take #1: Vector2d Compatible

A

ABC (Abstract Base Class)

advantages of, Alex Martelli’s Waterfowl

appropriate use of, Interfaces: From Protocols to ABCs, Alex Martelli’s Waterfowl, Chapter Summary

as mixins, 5. An ABC May Also Be a Mixin; The Reverse Is Not True

declaring, ABC Syntax Details

defining and using, Defining and Using an ABC-A Virtual Subclass of Tombola

definition of term, Python Jargon

explicit interfaces using, 2. Make Interfaces Explicit with ABCs

goose typing and, Chapter Summary

in standard library, ABCs in the Standard Library

numbers package, The Numbers Tower of ABCs

subclass creation, Subclassing the Tombola ABC

subclass testing, How the Tombola Subclasses Were Tested

subclassing process, Subclassing an ABC

syntax details, ABC Syntax Details

virtual subclass creation, A Virtual Subclass of Tombola

ABC language, An Array of Sequences, Further Reading, Python Jargon

abs function, Emulating Numeric Types

absolute values, Emulating Numeric Types

accessor methods, Dynamic Attributes and Properties, Further Reading, Python Jargon

accumulating functions, Iterable Reducing Functions

Adapter pattern, Multiple Inheritance in the Real World

addition

2D vector, Emulating Numeric Types

vector, Overloading + for Vector Addition-Overloading + for Vector Addition

aggregate classes, 7. Provide Aggregate Classes to Users

aiohttp package, Downloading with asyncio and aiohttp, An aiohttp Web Server

algorithms

binary search, Managing Ordered Sequences with bisect

C3 algorithm, Multiple Inheritance and Method Resolution Order

cryptographic, Launching Processes with concurrent.futures, Chapter 17: Cryptographic Examples

for hash tables, The hash table algorithm

RC4, Chapter 17: Cryptographic Examples

Timsort sorting algorithm, Further Reading

Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA), Sorting with the Unicode Collation Algorithm

aliasing, Identity, Equality, and Aliases, Python Jargon

and operator, Operator Overloading 101

anonymous functions, Anonymous Functions, Further Reading, Closures

arcfour.py module, Chapter 17: Cryptographic Examples

argument lists, Anonymous Functions

arguments

definition of term, Python Jargon

explicit self, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor, Further Reading

freezing with functools.parital, Freezing Arguments with functools.partial

grabbing arbitrary excess, Using * to grab excess items

instance, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor

keyword-only, From Positional to Keyword-Only Parameters

arithmetic operators, Arithmetic Operators, Overview of Special Methods, The operator Module, Operator Overloading 101

arithmetic progression generator, Another Example: Arithmetic Progression Generator

array.array library, An Alternative Constructor

arrays

benefits of, Arrays

building with generator expressions, Generator Expressions

creating, saving and loading, Arrays

handling with memory views, Memory Views

handling with NumPy, NumPy and SciPy

vs. lists, Arrays

asciize function, Extreme “Normalization”: Taking Out Diacritics

assignment

augmented, Overview of Special Methods, Augmented Assignment with Sequences-A += Assignment Puzzler, Augmented Assignment Operators-Augmented Assignment Operators

destructuring, Python Jargon

of variables, Variables Are Not Boxes

overwriting descriptors with, Overwriting a Descriptor in the Class

parallel, Tuple Unpacking, Python Jargon

to slices, Assigning to Slices

asynchronous operations, Running Circles Around Blocking Calls, Further Reading

asyncio package, Concurrency with asyncio-Smarter Clients for Better Concurrency

APIs provided by, Deques and Other Queues

asynchronous operations, Running Circles Around Blocking Calls

asyncio.as_completed, Using asyncio.as_completed

asyncio.Future class, asyncio.Future: Nonblocking by Design

asyncio.Task objects, Yielding from Futures, Tasks, and Coroutines

asyncio.wait(…), Downloading with asyncio and aiohttp

avoiding event loop blocking, Using an Executor to Avoid Blocking the Event Loop

benefits of, Further Reading

coroutines in, Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison

coroutines vs. futures, Yielding from Futures, Tasks, and Coroutines

development of, Concurrency with asyncio

downloader script enhancement, Enhancing the asyncio downloader Script

downloading with aiohttp package, Downloading with asyncio and aiohttp

TCP server, An asyncio TCP Server

time.sleep(…), Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison

vs. Threading module, Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison

writing asyncio servers, Writing asyncio Servers-Smarter Clients for Better Concurrency

yield from construct and, asyncio.Future: Nonblocking by Design, Downloading with asyncio and aiohttp

attribute access (.), Operator Overloading: Doing It Right

attribute descriptors, Attribute Descriptors-Chapter Summary

attribute validation, Descriptor Example: Attribute Validation-LineItem Take #5: A New Descriptor Type

docstrings, Descriptor docstring and Overriding Deletion

methods as, Methods Are Descriptors

overriding deletion, Descriptor docstring and Overriding Deletion

overriding vs. nonoverriding, Overriding Versus Nonoverriding Descriptors-Overwriting a Descriptor in the Class

overview of, Attribute Descriptors

overwriting, Overwriting a Descriptor in the Class

usage tips, Descriptor Usage Tips

using, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor

vs. property factories, LineItem Take #4: Automatic Storage Attribute Names

attribute validation

automatic storage attribute names, LineItem Take #4: Automatic Storage Attribute Names

new descriptor types, LineItem Take #5: A New Descriptor Type

simple descriptor class, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor

attributes

assigning arbitrary, Function Introspection

definition of term, Python Jargon

deleting, Handling Attribute Deletion

dynamic, Dynamic Attributes and Properties-Linked Record Retrieval with Properties

dynamic access, Vector Take #3: Dynamic Attribute Access

handling of, Essential Attributes and Functions for Attribute Handling

instance, Descriptor Usage Tips

listing, Function Introspection

managed, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor, Python Jargon

names, The Invalid Attribute Name Problem

of user-defined functions, Function Introspection

overriding, Overriding Class Attributes

private and protected, Private and “Protected” Attributes in Python, Further Reading, Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture

public, Further Reading, Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture

special, Special Attributes that Affect Attribute Handling

storage, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor, LineItem Take #4: Automatic Storage Attribute Names, Python Jargon

validating with descriptors, Descriptor Example: Attribute Validation-LineItem Take #5: A New Descriptor Type

validating with properties, Using a Property for Attribute Validation

augmented assignment, Overview of Special Methods, Augmented Assignment with Sequences-A += Assignment Puzzler, Augmented Assignment Operators-Augmented Assignment Operators

B

backslash (\), List Comprehensions and Readability

BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life), Python Jargon

BIF (see built-in functions)

big-endian byte ordering, BOM: A Useful Gremlin

binary search algorithm, Managing Ordered Sequences with bisect

binary sequences

building, Byte Essentials

built-in types for, Byte Essentials

definition of term, Python Jargon

displays used, Byte Essentials

fromhex class method, Byte Essentials

sharing memory, Byte Essentials

str method support, Byte Essentials

bisect module

inserting with bisect.insort, Inserting with bisect.insort

main functions, Managing Ordered Sequences with bisect

searching with bisect function, Searching with bisect

bitwise operators, Overview of Special Methods, Operator Overloading 101

blocking I/O functions, Blocking I/O and the GIL, Running Circles Around Blocking Calls

Bobo HTTP micro-framework, Retrieving Information About Parameters, Further Reading

BOM (Byte Order Mark), BOM: A Useful Gremlin, Python Jargon

bool (x), Boolean Value of a Custom Type

boolean values, custom types and, Boolean Value of a Custom Type

bound methods, Python Jargon

built-in functions, list.sort and the sorted Built-In Function, Dictionaries and Sets, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects, Built-In Functions for Attribute Handling, Python Jargon

built-in methods, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects

byte strings, Python Jargon

bytearray type, Byte Essentials

bytes (see encoding/decoding)

bytes argument, str Versus bytes in Regular Expressions

bytes type, Byte Essentials

bytes-like objects, Python Jargon

C

C3 algorithm, Multiple Inheritance and Method Resolution Order

caches

attribute descriptors and, Descriptor Usage Tips

using WeakValueDictionary class, The WeakValueDictionary Skit

weak references and, Weak References

call by reference, Further Reading

call by sharing, Function Parameters as References, Further Reading

Callable ABC, ABCs in collections.abc

callable objects, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects, Python Jargon

callable() function, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects

callbacks

callback hell, From Callbacks to Futures and Coroutines

vs. coroutines, Using an Executor to Avoid Blocking the Event Loop

vs. futures, From Callbacks to Futures and Coroutines

CamelCase, Further Reading, Afterword, Python Jargon

canonical equivalents, Normalizing Unicode for Saner Comparisons

card deck example, A Pythonic Card Deck-A Pythonic Card Deck

cartesian products, generating lists from, Cartesian Products

case folding, Case Folding

ChainMap, Variations of dict

characters

code point identification, Character Issues

compatibility, Normalizing Unicode for Saner Comparisons

definition of term, Character Issues

encoding/decoding of, Character Issues

Unicode standard for, Character Issues

Chardet Universal Character Encoding Detector, How to Discover the Encoding of a Byte Sequence

charfinder.py module, An asyncio TCP Server

Cheese Shop, Python Jargon

class decorators

drawbacks of, A Class Decorator for Customizing Descriptors

for customizing descriptors, A Class Decorator for Customizing Descriptors

vs. function decorators, A Class Decorator for Customizing Descriptors

vs. metaclasses, Class Metaprogramming

class metaprogramming, Class Metaprogramming-Chapter Summary

class factory, A Class Factory

classes as objects, Classes as Objects

descriptor customization, A Class Decorator for Customizing Descriptors

exec/eval functions and, A Class Factory

import time vs. runtime, What Happens When: Import Time Versus Runtime-Solution for scenario #2

metaclass basics, Metaclasses 101-Solution for scenario #4

metaclass for customizing descriptors, A Metaclass for Customizing Descriptors

metaclasses vs. class decorators, Class Metaprogramming

__prepare__, The Metaclass __prepare__ Special Method

classes

aggregate, 7. Provide Aggregate Classes to Users

as callable objects, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects

as objects, Classes as Objects, Further Reading

customizing at runtime (see class metaprogramming)

definition of term, Python Jargon

descriptor, Attribute Descriptors, LineItem Take #4: Automatic Storage Attribute Names, Python Jargon

managed, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor, Python Jargon

metaclasses, Metaclasses 101-Solution for scenario #4, Python Jargon

MGN notation for, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor

mixin, 3. Use Mixins for Code Reuse, A Modern Example: Mixins in Django Generic Views-A Modern Example: Mixins in Django Generic Views, Python Jargon

multilevel hierarchies, Further Reading

classmethod decorator, classmethod Versus staticmethod

closures (see decorators and closures)

code point, Character Issues, Python Jargon

code smell, Alex Martelli’s Waterfowl, Python Jargon

code, top-level, What Happens When: Import Time Versus Runtime

codec module, Basic Encoders/Decoders, Python Jargon

coding idioms, Further Reading

collections

definition of term, Python Jargon

iterability of, Iterables, Iterators, and Generators

collections.abc module

ABCs in, ABCs in collections.abc

collections.ChainMap, Variations of dict

collections.Counter, Variations of dict

collections.defaultdict, Overview of Common Mapping Methods, defaultdict: Another Take on Missing Keys

collections.deque class, Deques and Other Queues

collections.MutableSequence, Subclassing an ABC

collections.MutableSet, Set Operations

collections.namedtuple function, Named Tuples

collections.OrderedDict, Overview of Common Mapping Methods, Variations of dict

collections.UserDict, Subclassing UserDict

Mapping/MutableMapping ABCs, Generic Mapping Types, ABCs in collections.abc

multiple inheritance in, Multiple Inheritance in the Real World

Command design pattern, Command

comparison operators, Overview of Special Methods, Operator Overloading 101, Rich Comparison Operators-Rich Comparison Operators

compatibility characters, Normalizing Unicode for Saner Comparisons

composition, 8. “Favor Object Composition Over Class Inheritance.”

compounds, Further Reading

concrete subclasses, Subclassing an ABC, Subclassing the Tombola ABC, 6. Don’t Subclass from More Than One Concrete Class

concurrency

asynchronous operations, Running Circles Around Blocking Calls, Further Reading

better approach to, Further Reading

concurrent vs. sequential scripts, Example: Web Downloads in Three Styles

concurrent.futures download, Downloading with concurrent.futures

concurrent.futures task launching, Launching Processes with concurrent.futures

error handling and, Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling, Error Handling in the flags2 Examples

examples of, Example: Web Downloads in Three Styles

GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) and, Blocking I/O and the GIL

importance of, Example: Web Downloads in Three Styles

importance of futures in, Where Are the Futures?

in other languages, Further Reading

multiple download requests, Doing Multiple Requests for Each Download

nonblocking design and, asyncio.Future: Nonblocking by Design

progress displays, Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling

smarter clients for, Smarter Clients for Better Concurrency

testing concurrent clients, Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling

threading vs. coroutines, Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison

threading/multiprocessing alternatives, Threading and Multiprocessing Alternatives

using futures.as_completed, Using futures.as_completed

vs. parallelism, Concurrency with asyncio

with asyncio package, Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison-Smarter Clients for Better Concurrency

with Executor.map function, Experimenting with Executor.map

concurrent.futures library, Concurrency with Futures-Chapter Summary

behind the scenes operation of, Where Are the Futures?

benefits of, Further Reading

downloading, Downloading with concurrent.futures

futures.as_completed, Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling, Using futures.as_completed

futures.ProcessPoolExecutor, Threading and Multiprocessing Alternatives

introduction of, Concurrency with Futures

launching processes with, Launching Processes with concurrent.futures

"Considered Harmful" article, Python Jargon

constructors, definition of term, Python Jargon

Container ABC, ABCs in collections.abc

container sequences, Overview of Built-In Sequences, Further Reading

containers, definition of term, Python Jargon

context managers

contextlib utilities, The contextlib Utilities

definition of term, Python Jargon

temporary contexts via with statements, Context Managers and else Blocks

uses for, Context Managers and with Blocks

with statement and, Context Managers and with Blocks

continuous simulation, About Discrete Event Simulations

copy function, Deep and Shallow Copies of Arbitrary Objects

coroutines

benefits of, From Callbacks to Futures and Coroutines

computing running averages, Example: Coroutine to Compute a Running Average

decorators for priming, Decorators for Coroutine Priming

definition of term, Python Jargon

delaying, Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison

evolution of, How Coroutines Evolved from Generators

exception handling, Coroutine Termination and Exception Handling

for discrete event simulation, Use Case: Coroutines for Discrete Event Simulation-The Taxi Fleet Simulation, Chapter 16: Taxi Fleet Discrete Event Simulation

generators as, Generators as Coroutines, Basic Behavior of a Generator Used as a Coroutine

in asyncio, Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison

obtaining Tasks, Yielding from Futures, Tasks, and Coroutines

possible states of, Basic Behavior of a Generator Used as a Coroutine

returning values from, Returning a Value from a Coroutine

termination of, Coroutine Termination and Exception Handling

vs. callbacks, Using an Executor to Avoid Blocking the Event Loop

vs. futures, Yielding from Futures, Tasks, and Coroutines

vs. generators, Coroutines

vs. threading, Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison

yield from meaning, The Meaning of yield from-The Meaning of yield from

yield from use, Using yield from-Using yield from

yield keyword and, Basic Behavior of a Generator Used as a Coroutine

cosine similarity, Sequence Hacking, Hashing, and Slicing

Counter, Variations of dict

cp1252 encoding, Basic Encoders/Decoders

cp437 encoding, Basic Encoders/Decoders

CPython, del and Garbage Collection, Blocking I/O and the GIL, Python Jargon

CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete), Python Jargon

cryptographic algorithms, Launching Processes with concurrent.futures, Chapter 17: Cryptographic Examples

curly brackets ({}), List Comprehensions and Readability

D

data attributes (see attributes)

data descriptors (see overriding descriptors)

data model, The Python Data Model-Further Reading

behavior of __len__, Why len Is Not a Method

boolean value of custom types, Boolean Value of a Custom Type

emulating numeric types, Emulating Numeric Types

example of, A Pythonic Card Deck

metaobject protocol, Further Reading

overview of, The Python Data Model

protocols and sequences, Python Digs Sequences

special (magic) methods, The Python Data Model, Further Reading

special methods, overview of, Overview of Special Methods

special methods, using, How Special Methods Are Used

string representation, String Representation

vs. object model, Further Reading

data structures

dictionaries and sets, Dictionaries and Sets-Further Reading

sequences, An Array of Sequences-Further Reading

text vs. bytes, Text versus Bytes-Further Reading

database conversion utility, Case Study: Generators in a Database Conversion Utility, Chapter 14: isis2json.py Database Conversion Script

dbm module, Restructuring the OSCON Feed with shelve

decimal.Decimal class, Unary Operators

Decorator pattern, How It Works, Further Reading

decorators and closures, Function Decorators and Closures-Further Reading

classmethod vs. staticmethod, classmethod Versus staticmethod

closure example, Closures

closure overview, Closures

closures vs. anonymous functions, Closures

decorator behavior, How It Works

decorator implementation, Implementing a Simple Decorator

definition of closures, Closures

definition of decorators, Decorators 101, Python Jargon

dynamic scope, Further Reading

in Python standard library, Decorators in the Standard Library-Generic Functions with Single Dispatch

key function of decorators, When Python Executes Decorators

nonlocal declaration, The nonlocal Declaration

parameterized decorators, Parameterized Decorators-The Parameterized Clock Decorator

priming decorators, Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison

purpose of decorators, Function Decorators and Closures

registration decorators, Decorator-Enhanced Strategy Pattern, A Parameterized Registration Decorator

stacked decorators, Stacked Decorators

stacked function decorators, ABC Syntax Details

variable scope rules, Variable Scope Rules

deep copies, Deep and Shallow Copies of Arbitrary Objects, Python Jargon

deepcopy function, Deep and Shallow Copies of Arbitrary Objects

defaultdict, Overview of Common Mapping Methods, defaultdict: Another Take on Missing Keys

default_factory, defaultdict: Another Take on Missing Keys

del statement

behavior of, del and Garbage Collection

in-place modifications with, Assigning to Slices

object attribute deletion with, Handling Attribute Deletion

delegating generators, Using yield from

deques package, Deques and Other Queues

descriptor classes, Attribute Descriptors, LineItem Take #4: Automatic Storage Attribute Names

descriptor instances, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor

descriptors

customizing, A Class Decorator for Customizing Descriptors, A Metaclass for Customizing Descriptors

definition of term, Python Jargon

nonoverriding, Overriding Versus Nonoverriding Descriptors, Python Jargon

overriding, Overriding Versus Nonoverriding Descriptors, Python Jargon

(see also attribute descriptors)

validation, Descriptor Usage Tips

design patterns, Design Patterns with First-Class Functions-Further Reading

Adapter, Multiple Inheritance in the Real World

choosing the best Strategy, Choosing the Best Strategy: Simple Approach

classic Strategy, Case Study: Refactoring Strategy

Command, Command

Decorator, How It Works

finding strategies in modules, Finding Strategies in a Module

function-oriented Strategy, Function-Oriented Strategy

language-dependent relevancy of, Design Patterns with First-Class Functions, Further Reading

destructuring assignment, Python Jargon

diacritics, Extreme “Normalization”: Taking Out Diacritics

diamond problem, Multiple Inheritance and Method Resolution Order-Multiple Inheritance and Method Resolution Order

dict, Hash Tables in Dictionaries

dict comprehensions (dictcomp), dict Comprehensions

dict.get, Handling Missing Keys with setdefault

dict.setdefault, Handling Missing Keys with setdefault

dictionaries and sets, Dictionaries and Sets-Further Reading

building dictionaries, Generic Mapping Types

creating new mapping types, Subclassing UserDict

dictcomp (dict comprehensions), dict Comprehensions

immutable mappings, Immutable Mappings

implementation with hash tables, dict and set Under the Hood-How Sets Work—Practical Consequences

mapping methods overview, Overview of Common Mapping Methods

mapping types, Generic Mapping Types

mappings with flexible key lookup, Mappings with Flexible Key Lookup

practical consequences, How Sets Work—Practical Consequences

set theory, Set Theory

variations of dict, Variations of dict

dir function, Function Introspection

dir([object]) function, Built-In Functions for Attribute Handling

dis module, Variable Scope Rules

discrete event simulation (DES)

processes in, About Discrete Event Simulations

taxi_sim.py simulation, The Taxi Fleet Simulation

taxi_sim.py support script, Chapter 16: Taxi Fleet Discrete Event Simulation

threading approaches, About Discrete Event Simulations

vs. continuous simulation, About Discrete Event Simulations

displays, formatted, Formatted Displays

Django framework, Function Introspection, A Modern Example: Mixins in Django Generic Views-A Modern Example: Mixins in Django Generic Views

docstrings (documentation strings), Python Jargon

doctest testing package

+ELLIPSIS directive, A Pythonic Card Deck

definition of term, Python Jargon

DOS (Denial of Service) attack, Example: Web Downloads in Three Styles, Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling, Enhancing the asyncio downloader Script

double asterisk (**), From Positional to Keyword-Only Parameters

double underscore (dunder), The Python Data Model, The Python Data Model, Python Jargon

downloads

aiohttp web server, An aiohttp Web Server

asyncio TCP server, An asyncio TCP Server

concurrent vs. sequential, Example: Web Downloads in Three Styles

error handling for, Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling, Error Handling in the flags2 Examples

multiple requests for, Doing Multiple Requests for Each Download

progress displays, Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling, Using futures.as_completed

with aiohttp package, Downloading with asyncio and aiohttp

DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle, Python Jargon

duck typing

definition of term, Python Jargon

example of, Overview of Common Mapping Methods

origin of term, Alex Martelli’s Waterfowl

origins of, Further Reading

protocols and, Protocols and Duck Typing

Python support for, A Pythonic Object

dummy variables, Tuple Unpacking

dunder methods, The Python Data Model

(see also special methods)

dynamic attributes

data wrangling with, Data Wrangling with Dynamic Attributes

exploring JSON-like data with, Exploring JSON-Like Data with Dynamic Attributes

flexible object creation, Flexible Object Creation with __new__

invalid attribute name problem, The Invalid Attribute Name Problem

linked record retrieval, Linked Record Retrieval with Properties

overview of, Dynamic Attributes and Properties

restructuring data with shelve module, Restructuring the OSCON Feed with shelve

dynamic scope, Further Reading

dynamic-typed languages, Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture, Further Reading

E

EAFP principle, Do This, Then That: else Blocks Beyond if, Python Jargon

eager objects, Python Jargon

elementwise multiplication, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

ellipsis (…), Multidimensional Slicing and Ellipsis, Vector Take #1: Vector2d Compatible

else clause, Do This, Then That: else Blocks Beyond if

encoding/decoding, Text versus Bytes-Further Reading

basic codecs, Basic Encoders/Decoders

basic encoders and decoders, Basic Encoders/Decoders

BOM (Byte Order Mark), BOM: A Useful Gremlin

bytes and bytearrays, Byte Essentials

case folding, Case Folding

code point conversion during, Character Issues

default encoding setting, Encoding Defaults: A Madhouse

determining byte sequence encoding, How to Discover the Encoding of a Byte Sequence

diacritics, Extreme “Normalization”: Taking Out Diacritics

dual-mode str and bytes APIs, Dual-Mode str and bytes APIs

example of, Character Issues

normalized text matching, Utility Functions for Normalized Text Matching

overview of, Text versus Bytes

problems encountered, Understanding Encode/Decode Problems-BOM: A Useful Gremlin

sorting Unicode text, Sorting Unicode Text

sorting with Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA), Sorting with the Unicode Collation Algorithm

str representation in RAM, Further Reading

string and character representation, Character Issues

structs and memory views, Structs and Memory Views

text files, Handling Text Files-Encoding Defaults: A Madhouse

Unicode database, The Unicode Database

Unicode normalization, Normalizing Unicode for Saner Comparisons-Extreme “Normalization”: Taking Out Diacritics

enforced descriptors (see overriding descriptors)

error handling, for web downloads, Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling

eval function, A Class Factory

evaluation time exercises, The Evaluation Time Exercises, The Metaclass Evaluation Time Exercise

Event Loop Policy API, Further Reading

event simulation (see discrete event simulation (DES))

exec function, A Class Factory

Executor.map function, Experimenting with Executor.map

Executor.submit function, Experimenting with Executor.map

F

fail-fast design, Handling Missing Keys with setdefault, Python Jargon

falsiness, Boolean Value of a Custom Type, Python Jargon

file-like objects, Python Jargon

filter function, Listcomps Versus map and filter, Modern Replacements for map, filter, and reduce

first-class functions

anonymous functions, Anonymous Functions, Further Reading

as first-class objects, First-Class Functions

callable objects, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects

definition of term, Python Jargon

design patterns with, Design Patterns with First-Class Functions-Further Reading

flexible parameter handling, From Positional to Keyword-Only Parameters

function annotations, Function Annotations

function introspection, Function Introspection

functional programming packages, Packages for Functional Programming-Freezing Arguments with functools.partial

higher-order functions, Higher-Order Functions

retrieving parameter information, Retrieving Information About Parameters

treating functions like objects, Treating a Function Like an Object

user-defined callable types, User-Defined Callable Types

first-class objects, First-Class Functions, Further Reading

flags2_common.py module, Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling, Chapter 17: flags2 HTTP Client Examples

flat sequences, Overview of Built-In Sequences, Further Reading, Python Jargon

flexible string representation, Further Reading

flyweights, Function-Oriented Strategy

folding functions, Iterable Reducing Functions

fold_equal function, Utility Functions for Normalized Text Matching

for loops, Vector Take #4: Hashing and a Faster ==

for/else clause, Do This, Then That: else Blocks Beyond if

format function, Formatted Displays

Format Specification Mini-Language, Formatted Displays, Vector Take #5: Formatting

Format String Syntax library, String Representation, Formatted Displays

formatted displays, Formatted Displays

404 errors (Not Found), Error Handling in the flags2 Examples

free variables, Closures, Further Reading

fromhex class method, Byte Essentials

frozenset, Set Theory

fsdecode(filename) function, str Versus bytes on os Functions

fsencode(filename) function, str Versus bytes on os Functions

function invocation (()), Operator Overloading: Doing It Right

function overloading, Generic Functions with Single Dispatch

function parameters, Function Parameters as References

functional programming

packages for, Packages for Functional Programming-Freezing Arguments with functools.partial

with Python, Further Reading

functions

accumulating, Iterable Reducing Functions

anonymous, Anonymous Functions, Further Reading, Closures

as first-class objects, Further Reading

assigning arbitrary attributes to, Function Introspection

blocking I/O, Blocking I/O and the GIL, Running Circles Around Blocking Calls

built-in, list.sort and the sorted Built-In Function, Dictionaries and Sets, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects, Built-In Functions for Attribute Handling, Python Jargon

built-in vs. special methods, How Special Methods Are Used

decorators and closures, Function Decorators and Closures-Further Reading, ABC Syntax Details

definition of term, Python Jargon

design patterns with, Design Patterns with First-Class Functions-Further Reading

first-class, First-Class Functions-Further Reading, Python Jargon

folding, Iterable Reducing Functions

generator, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects, Further Reading, Python Jargon

generic, Python Jargon

higher-order, Higher-Order Functions, Freezing Arguments with functools.partial, Python Jargon

user-defined, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects

using arithmetic operators as, The operator Module

functools module

functools.lru_cache, Memoization with functools.lru_cache

functools.partial, Freezing Arguments with functools.partial

functools.reduce(), Vector Take #4: Hashing and a Faster ==, Iterable Reducing Functions

functools.singledispatch, Generic Functions with Single Dispatch, Generic Functions with Single Dispatch

functools.wraps decorator, How It Works

generator functions in, Generator Functions in the Standard Library

futures

creation of, Where Are the Futures?

definition of term, Concurrency with Futures

in asyncio, asyncio.Future: Nonblocking by Design

in Concurrent.futures library, Where Are the Futures?

practical example of, Where Are the Futures?

purpose of, Where Are the Futures?

vs. callbacks, From Callbacks to Futures and Coroutines

yield from construct and, asyncio.Future: Nonblocking by Design

futures.ProcessPoolExecutor, Threading and Multiprocessing Alternatives

G

garbage collection, del and Garbage Collection, Further Reading

gb2312 encoding, Basic Encoders/Decoders

generator expressions (genexps)

as alternative to map/filter, Modern Replacements for map, filter, and reduce, Generator Functions in the Standard Library

benefits of, Generator Expressions

best use of, Generator Expressions: When to Use Them

definition of term, Python Jargon

lazy evaluation of, Further Reading, Sentence Take #5: A Generator Expression

generator functions

definition of term, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects, Python Jargon

implementing iteration with, Sentence Take #3: A Generator Function

in standard library, Generator Functions in the Standard Library-Generator Functions in the Standard Library

syntax of, Further Reading

generators

coroutines as, Basic Behavior of a Generator Used as a Coroutine

definition of term, Python Jargon

delegating, Using yield from

in database conversion utility, Case Study: Generators in a Database Conversion Utility

subgenerators, Using yield from

vs. coroutines, Coroutines

vs. iterators, Iterables, Iterators, and Generators

generic functions, Generic Functions with Single Dispatch, Python Jargon

getattr(object, name[, default]) function, Built-In Functions for Attribute Handling

GIL (Global Interpreter Lock)

benefits of, Further Reading

blocking I/O and, Blocking I/O and the GIL

limitations of, Where Are the Futures?

globals function, Finding Strategies in a Module

Go language, Further Reading

GoF (Gang of Four), Python Jargon

goose typing

defining/using an ABC, Defining and Using an ABC

definition of term, Alex Martelli’s Waterfowl

example of, Subclassing an ABC

explicit checks against abstract types, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

introduction of term, Chapter Summary

registering virtual subclasses with, A Virtual Subclass of Tombola

__subclasshook__ and, Geese Can Behave as Ducks, Why Sequences Are Iterable: The iter Function

gremlins, definition of term, Coping with UnicodeDecodeError

H

hasattr(object, name) function, Built-In Functions for Attribute Handling

hash tables

algorithm for, The hash table algorithm

definition of hashable, Generic Mapping Types

efficiency of, A Performance Experiment, Key search is very fast

equality and, Hashes and equality

hash bit patterns, Hashes and equality, Chapter 3: Compare the Bit Patterns of Hashes

hash collisions, The hash table algorithm

implementation of dict with, Hash Tables in Dictionaries

importance of, Dictionaries and Sets

key type limitations, Practical Consequences of How dict Works

memory limitations, dicts have significant memory overhead

practical consequences, How Sets Work—Practical Consequences

unpredictable key ordering, Key ordering depends on insertion order

Hashable ABC, ABCs in collections.abc

hashable objects, A Hashable Vector2d, Python Jargon

heapq package, Deques and Other Queues

higher-order functions, Higher-Order Functions, Freezing Arguments with functools.partial, Python Jargon

HTTP protocol, Downloading with asyncio and aiohttp

I

idiom, definition of term, Python Jargon

if statements, Boolean Value of a Custom Type

if/else clause, Do This, Then That: else Blocks Beyond if

immutability, Further Reading

immutable sequences, Overview of Built-In Sequences, Monkey-Patching to Implement a Protocol at Runtime

implementation inheritance, 1. Distinguish Interface Inheritance from Implementation Inheritance

import time, When Python Executes Decorators, What Happens When: Import Time Versus Runtime, Python Jargon

in-place addition, Augmented Assignment with Sequences, Augmented Assignment Operators

infix operators

@ sign and, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

exception handling, Overloading + for Vector Addition

method names, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

operands and, Overloading + for Vector Addition

operator overloading and, Operator Overloading: Doing It Right

special dispatching mechanism for, Overloading + for Vector Addition

inheritance

across languages, Further Reading

among generic mapping types, Generic Mapping Types

from UserDict, Subclassing UserDict

interface vs. implementation, 1. Distinguish Interface Inheritance from Implementation Inheritance

lack of in virtual subclasses, A Virtual Subclass of Tombola

multiple (see multiple inheritance)

subclassing pitfalls, Subclassing Built-In Types Is Tricky

vs. composition, Vector: A User-Defined Sequence Type, 8. “Favor Object Composition Over Class Inheritance.”

initializers, definition of term, Python Jargon

insort function, Managing Ordered Sequences with bisect

instance argument, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor

instance attributes, Descriptor Usage Tips

instances

as callable objects, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects

attributes vs. properties, Properties Override Instance Attributes

construction of, Flexible Object Creation with __new__

descriptor, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor

managed, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor, Python Jargon

MGN notation for, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor

interface inheritance, 1. Distinguish Interface Inheritance from Implementation Inheritance

interfaces

ABC (Abstract Base Class), Subclassing an ABC-A Virtual Subclass of Tombola

definition of term, Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture

explicit, 2. Make Interfaces Explicit with ABCs

in other languages, Further Reading

protocols as informal, Further Reading

Python approach to, Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture

Sequence, Python Digs Sequences

is operator, Choosing Between == and is, Operator Overloading 101

isinstance checks, Alex Martelli’s Waterfowl

isis2json.py script, Chapter 14: isis2json.py Database Conversion Script

iso8859_1 encoding, Basic Encoders/Decoders

item access/slicing ([]), Operator Overloading: Doing It Right

iter function

calling with 2 arguments, A Closer Look at the iter Function

steps implemented by, Why Sequences Are Iterable: The iter Function

vs. special method, How Special Methods Are Used

word-by-word iteration with, Sentence Take #1: A Sequence of Words

Iterable ABC, ABCs in collections.abc

iterable objects, Iterables Versus Iterators, Python Jargon

iterable unpacking, Tuple Unpacking, Python Jargon

iteration

fundamental nature of, Iterables, Iterators, and Generators

implicit nature of, A Pythonic Card Deck

special treatment during, Python Digs Sequences

with generator functions, Sentence Take #3: A Generator Function

Iterator pattern

arithmetic progression generator, Another Example: Arithmetic Progression Generator

benefits of, Iterables, Iterators, and Generators

classic implementation of, Sentence Take #2: A Classic Iterator

common errors, Making Sentence an Iterator: Bad Idea

determining iterability, Why Sequences Are Iterable: The iter Function

generator expressions and, Sentence Take #5: A Generator Expression

generator functions and, Sentence Take #3: A Generator Function, Generator Functions in the Standard Library-Generator Functions in the Standard Library

iter built-in function, Why Sequences Are Iterable: The iter Function, A Closer Look at the iter Function

iterable reducing functions, Iterable Reducing Functions

iterables vs. iterators, Iterables Versus Iterators

lazy implementation, Sentence Take #4: A Lazy Implementation

practical example of, Case Study: Generators in a Database Conversion Utility

word-by-word iteration, Sentence Take #1: A Sequence of Words

iterators

definition of term, Iterables Versus Iterators, Python Jargon

entities supported by, Iterables, Iterators, and Generators

vs. generators, Iterables, Iterators, and Generators

vs. iterables, Iterables Versus Iterators

vs. subgenerators, Using yield from

itertools module, Arithmetic Progression with itertools, Generator Functions in the Standard Library

K

key argument, list.sort and the sorted Built-In Function, Further Reading

keys

handling missing, Handling Missing Keys with setdefault, defaultdict: Another Take on Missing Keys

limitations in hash tables, Practical Consequences of How dict Works

mapping with flexible key lookup, Mappings with Flexible Key Lookup

unpredictable ordering in hash tables, Key ordering depends on insertion order

keyword-only arguments, From Positional to Keyword-Only Parameters

KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle, Python Jargon

L

lambda keyword, Anonymous Functions

latin1 encoding, Basic Encoders/Decoders

lazy evaluation, Further Reading, Sentence Take #4: A Lazy Implementation

lazy objects, Python Jargon

len function, How Special Methods Are Used, Why len Is Not a Method

lexical scope, Further Reading

limited-length representations, Vector Take #1: Vector2d Compatible

line breaks, List Comprehensions and Readability

Lisp language, Iterables, Iterators, and Generators

list comprehensions (listcomps)

as alternative to map/filter functions, Modern Replacements for map, filter, and reduce

building sequences with, List Comprehensions and Generator Expressions

definition of term, Python Jargon

generating lists from cartesian products, Cartesian Products

nested lists, Building Lists of Lists

readability and, List Comprehensions and Readability

variable scope in, List Comprehensions and Readability

vs. generator expressions, Generator Expressions

vs. map and filter, Listcomps Versus map and filter

list.sort method, list.sort and the sorted Built-In Function

lists

alternatives to, When a List Is Not the Answer-Deques and Other Queues

argument lists, Anonymous Functions

building lists of lists, Building Lists of Lists

last seen items, Deques and Other Queues

mixed types in, Further Reading

sorting, list.sort and the sorted Built-In Function

using tuples as immutable, Tuples as Immutable Lists

vs. arrays, Arrays

vs. deque, Deques and Other Queues

little-endian byte ordering, BOM: A Useful Gremlin

liveness property, Python Jargon

locale settings, Sorting Unicode Text

locale.strxfrm function, Sorting Unicode Text

lru_cache decorator, Memoization with functools.lru_cache

Lundh’s lambda Refactoring Recipe, Anonymous Functions

LYBYL principle, Do This, Then That: else Blocks Beyond if

M

magic methods, The Python Data Model, Further Reading

(see also special methods)

managed attributes, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor, Python Jargon

managed classes, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor, Python Jargon

managed instances, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor, Python Jargon

map function, Listcomps Versus map and filter, Modern Replacements for map, filter, and reduce, Vector Take #4: Hashing and a Faster ==

mapping

benefits of literal syntax for, Further Reading

creating new mapping types, Subclassing UserDict

immutable, Immutable Mappings

mapping types, Generic Mapping Types

methods overview, Overview of Common Mapping Methods

mutable, The WeakValueDictionary Skit

variations of dict, Variations of dict

with flexible key lookup, Mappings with Flexible Key Lookup

Mapping ABC, ABCs in collections.abc

MappingProxyType wrapper class, Immutable Mappings

MappingView ABC, ABCs in collections.abc

memoization, Memoization with functools.lru_cache

memory views, Memory Views, Structs and Memory Views, Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture

memtest.py script, Chapter 9: RAM Usage With and Without __slots__

metaclasses

basics of, Metaclasses 101-Solution for scenario #4

definition of term, Python Jargon

evaluation time exercise, The Metaclass Evaluation Time Exercise

for customizing descriptors, A Metaclass for Customizing Descriptors

metaobject protocol, Further Reading

metaprogramming, Decorators 101, Class Metaprogramming, Python Jargon

(see also class metaprogramming)

method overloading, Generic Functions with Single Dispatch

methods

accessor, Python Jargon

as attribute descriptors, Methods Are Descriptors

as callable objects, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects

bound, Python Jargon

built-in, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects

definition of term, Dynamic Attributes and Properties

mixin, Python Jargon

special (see special methods)

unbound, Multiple Inheritance and Method Resolution Order, Python Jargon

Meyer’s Uniform Access Principle (UAP), Further Reading

MGN (Mills & Gizmos Notation), LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor

missing keys, Handling Missing Keys with setdefault

mixin classes, 3. Use Mixins for Code Reuse, A Modern Example: Mixins in Django Generic Views-A Modern Example: Mixins in Django Generic Views, Python Jargon

mixin methods, Python Jargon

monkey patching, Monkey-Patching to Implement a Protocol at Runtime, Further Reading, Overwriting a Descriptor in the Class, Python Jargon

MRO (Method Resolution Order), A Virtual Subclass of Tombola, Multiple Inheritance and Method Resolution Order-Multiple Inheritance and Method Resolution Order

multidimensional slicing, Multidimensional Slicing and Ellipsis

multilevel class hierarchies, Further Reading

multiple inheritance

best practices, Coping with Multiple Inheritance-Tkinter: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

drawbacks of, Inheritance: For Good or For Worse

in Django framework, A Modern Example: Mixins in Django Generic Views-A Modern Example: Mixins in Django Generic Views

in practice, Multiple Inheritance in the Real World

method resolution order and, Multiple Inheritance and Method Resolution Order-Multiple Inheritance and Method Resolution Order

origins of, Further Reading

subclassing pitfalls, Subclassing Built-In Types Is Tricky

multiplication

commutative property of, Arithmetic Operators

elementwise, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

scalar, Emulating Numeric Types, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

multiprocessing package, Deques and Other Queues

multiprocessing, alternatives to, Threading and Multiprocessing Alternatives

mutability, Further Reading

mutable mappings, The WeakValueDictionary Skit

mutable sequences, Overview of Built-In Sequences, Monkey-Patching to Implement a Protocol at Runtime

MutableMapping ABC, Generic Mapping Types

MutableSet, Set Operations

mutators, Python Jargon

N

name mangling, LineItem Take #4: Automatic Storage Attribute Names, Python Jargon

named tuple types, Named Tuples

nested lists, Building Lists of Lists

nested tuple unpacking, Nested Tuple Unpacking

NFC (Normalization Form C), Normalizing Unicode for Saner Comparisons

nfc_equal function, Utility Functions for Normalized Text Matching

NFKC/NFKD normalization, Normalizing Unicode for Saner Comparisons

nonlocal declaration, The nonlocal Declaration

nonlocal keyword, Function Decorators and Closures

nonoverriding descriptors, Overriding Versus Nonoverriding Descriptors, Python Jargon

normalized text matching, Utility Functions for Normalized Text Matching

not operator, Operator Overloading 101

NotImplemented, Overloading + for Vector Addition

NotImplementedError, Overloading + for Vector Addition

numeric types

emulating, Emulating Numeric Types

saving, Arrays

numerical tower, The Numbers Tower of ABCs

NumPy

benefits of, NumPy and SciPy

handling arrays with, NumPy and SciPy

installing, NumPy and SciPy

vector math with, Sequence Hacking, Hashing, and Slicing

O

object composition, 8. “Favor Object Composition Over Class Inheritance.”

object IDs, Identity, Equality, and Aliases

object model, Further Reading

(see also data model)

object publishing concept, Further Reading

object-oriented languages, The Python Data Model

objects

behaving like functions, User-Defined Callable Types

bytes-like, Python Jargon

callable, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects, Python Jargon

classes as, Classes as Objects

context managers, Python Jargon

creating with __new__, Flexible Object Creation with __new__

decorators, Python Jargon

deep copies of, Deep and Shallow Copies of Arbitrary Objects, Python Jargon

destruction of, Further Reading

eager, Python Jargon

file-like, Python Jargon

first-class, First-Class Functions, Further Reading

hashable, Generic Mapping Types, A Hashable Vector2d, Python Jargon

iterable, Iterables Versus Iterators, Python Jargon

iterators, Python Jargon

lazy, Python Jargon

mutable, Mutable Types as Parameter Defaults: Bad Idea, Further Reading

Pythonic, A Pythonic Object-Further Reading

referent, Weak References, Python Jargon

serialization of, Python Jargon

shallow copies of, Copies Are Shallow by Default, Python Jargon

singletons, Choosing Between == and is, Python Jargon

traceback, Weak References

unreachable, del and Garbage Collection

operator module, The operator Module

operator overloading, Operator Overloading: Doing It Right-Further Reading

augmented assignment operators, Augmented Assignment Operators-Augmented Assignment Operators

benefits of, Operator Overloading: Doing It Right, Further Reading

drawbacks of, Further Reading

for scalar multiplication, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

for vector addition, Overloading + for Vector Addition-Overloading + for Vector Addition

infix operators, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

overview of, Operator Overloading 101

rich comparison operators, Rich Comparison Operators-Rich Comparison Operators

unary operators, Unary Operators

or operator, Operator Overloading 101

OrderedDict, Overview of Common Mapping Methods, Variations of dict

ORM (Object-Relational Mapper), Python Jargon

os module, str Versus bytes on os Functions

OS processes, About Discrete Event Simulations

os.walk generator function, Generator Functions in the Standard Library

overriding descriptors, Overriding Versus Nonoverriding Descriptors, Python Jargon

P

parallel assignment, Tuple Unpacking, Python Jargon

parallel tasks, launching, Launching Processes with concurrent.futures

parallelism, vs. concurrency, Concurrency with asyncio

parameterized decorators, Parameterized Decorators-The Parameterized Clock Decorator

parameters

avoiding mutable objects as defaults, Mutable Types as Parameter Defaults: Bad Idea

definition of term, Python Jargon

flexible handling of, From Positional to Keyword-Only Parameters

function parameters as references, Function Parameters as References

passing, Further Reading

retrieving information about, Retrieving Information About Parameters

using mutable types, Defensive Programming with Mutable Parameters

parentheses ( () ), List Comprehensions and Readability, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects

pickle module, Restructuring the OSCON Feed with shelve

plain text, definition of term, Further Reading

prime, definition of term, Python Jargon

priming decorators, Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison

private attributes, Private and “Protected” Attributes in Python, Further Reading, Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture

process, definition of term, About Discrete Event Simulations

progress displays, Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling, Using futures.as_completed

properties

advantages of, Further Reading

attribute validation with, Using a Property for Attribute Validation

coding property factories, Coding a Property Factory, LineItem Take #4: Automatic Storage Attribute Names

documentation strings and, Property Documentation

instance attributes and, Properties Override Instance Attributes

linked record retrieval with, Linked Record Retrieval with Properties

overview of, A Proper Look at Properties

property function, Decorators in the Standard Library

protected attributes, Private and “Protected” Attributes in Python

protocols

as informal interfaces, Further Reading

benefits of, Monkey-Patching to Implement a Protocol at Runtime

definition of term, Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture

duck typing and, Protocols and Duck Typing

dynamic nature of, Monkey-Patching to Implement a Protocol at Runtime

implementation of, Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture

implementing at runtime, Monkey-Patching to Implement a Protocol at Runtime

sequence, Vector Take #2: A Sliceable Sequence, Python Digs Sequences, Sentence Take #1: A Sequence of Words

vs. inheritance, Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture

PSF (Python Software Foundation), Afterword

PUG (Python Users Group), Afterword

py.test library, Chapter 19: OSCON Schedule Scripts and Tests

PyPI (The Python Package Index), Python Jargon

PyPy language, Python Jargon

Python Imaging Library (PIL), Structs and Memory Views

Python standard library

ABCs in, ABCs in the Standard Library

advantages of special methods, A Pythonic Card Deck

array.array, An Alternative Constructor

decorators in, Decorators in the Standard Library-Generic Functions with Single Dispatch

deques package, Deques and Other Queues

generator functions in, Generator Functions in the Standard Library-Generator Functions in the Standard Library

implementing queues, Deques and Other Queues

Tkinter GUI toolkit, Multiple Inheritance in the Real World, Tkinter: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

truth value testing rules, Boolean Value of a Custom Type

Pythonic objects, A Pythonic Object-Further Reading

alternative constructor for, An Alternative Constructor

classmethod vs. staticmethod decorators, classmethod Versus staticmethod

formatted displays, Formatted Displays

hashability of, A Hashable Vector2d

object representations, Object Representations

overriding class attributes, Overriding Class Attributes

private and protected attributes, Private and “Protected” Attributes in Python, Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture

Vector2d class example, Vector Class Redux

__slots__ class attribute, Saving Space with the __slots__ Class Attribute

Pythonic, definition of term, Python Jargon

PyUCA library, Sorting with the Unicode Collation Algorithm

Q

queue package, Deques and Other Queues

R

RC4 algorithm, Chapter 17: Cryptographic Examples

re.findall function, Sentence Take #4: A Lazy Implementation

re.finditer function, Sentence Take #4: A Lazy Implementation

readability, List Comprehensions and Readability

real-time Web, Further Reading

record retrieval, Linked Record Retrieval with Properties

reduce function, Modern Replacements for map, filter, and reduce, Vector Take #4: Hashing and a Faster ==, Vector Take #4: Hashing and a Faster ==, Iterable Reducing Functions

reference counting (refcount), del and Garbage Collection, Further Reading, Python Jargon

reference variables, Variables Are Not Boxes

references

strong, Python Jargon

weak, Weak References, Python Jargon

referent objects, Weak References, Python Jargon

register method, A Virtual Subclass of Tombola, Usage of register in Practice

registration decorators, Decorator-Enhanced Strategy Pattern, A Parameterized Registration Decorator

regular expressions, str Versus bytes in Regular Expressions

REPL (Read-eval-print-loop), Python Jargon

repr function, Object Representations

reprlib module, Vector Take #1: Vector2d Compatible

requests library, A Sequential Download Script

reverse argument, list.sort and the sorted Built-In Function

reversed operators, Overview of Special Methods

rich comparison operators, Operator Overloading 101, Rich Comparison Operators-Rich Comparison Operators

running average, computing, Closures, Example: Coroutine to Compute a Running Average

runtime, When Python Executes Decorators, Monkey-Patching to Implement a Protocol at Runtime, What Happens When: Import Time Versus Runtime

run_in_executor method, Using an Executor to Avoid Blocking the Event Loop

S

sanitize.py module, Extreme “Normalization”: Taking Out Diacritics

scalar multiplication, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication

schedule1.py module, Restructuring the OSCON Feed with shelve, Chapter 19: OSCON Schedule Scripts and Tests

SciPy

benefits of, NumPy and SciPy

installing, NumPy and SciPy

vector math with, Sequence Hacking, Hashing, and Slicing

scope rules, Variable Scope Rules

security issues, with private attributes, Further Reading, Interfaces and Protocols in Python Culture

self argument, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor, Further Reading

Sequence ABC, ABCs in collections.abc

Sequence interface, Python Digs Sequences

sequence protocol, Python Digs Sequences, Sentence Take #1: A Sequence of Words

sequences, An Array of Sequences-Further Reading

alternative to lists, When a List Is Not the Answer

arrays, Arrays

augmented assignment with, Augmented Assignment with Sequences-A += Assignment Puzzler

binary, Byte Essentials, Python Jargon

building, List Comprehensions and Generator Expressions-Generator Expressions

concatenating multiple copies of, Using + and * with Sequences

definition of term, Python Jargon

flat, Python Jargon

flat vs. container, Further Reading

handling arrays with memory views, Memory Views

handling with deques and queues, Deques and Other Queues

handling with NumPy/SciPy, NumPy and SciPy

immutable flat, Vector: A User-Defined Sequence Type

iterability of, Why Sequences Are Iterable: The iter Function

managing ordered, Managing Ordered Sequences with bisect

mutable, Assigning to Slices, Monkey-Patching to Implement a Protocol at Runtime

overview of built-in, Overview of Built-In Sequences

slicing of, Slicing-Assigning to Slices, Python Jargon

sorting, list.sort and the sorted Built-In Function

tuples, Tuples Are Not Just Immutable Lists-Tuples as Immutable Lists

UML class diagram for, Overview of Built-In Sequences

serialization, Python Jargon

Set ABC, ABCs in collections.abc

set theory

element hashability, Set Theory

history of sets, Set Theory

mathematical set operations, Set Operations

overview of, Set Theory

set comparison operators, Set Operations

set comprehensions (setcomps), Set Comprehensions

set literals, set Literals

set operations, Set Operations

setattr(object, name, value) function, Built-In Functions for Attribute Handling

setlocale function, Sorting Unicode Text

sets (see dictionaries and sets)

shallow copies, Copies Are Shallow by Default, Python Jargon

shared-memory sequences, Memory Views, Structs and Memory Views

shelve module, Restructuring the OSCON Feed with shelve

SimPy, About Discrete Event Simulations

simulation, discrete vs. continuous, About Discrete Event Simulations

single underscore (_), Private and “Protected” Attributes in Python

singledispatch decorator, Generic Functions with Single Dispatch

singletons, Choosing Between == and is, Python Jargon

Sized ABC, ABCs in collections.abc

slicing

assigning to slices, Assigning to Slices

definition of term, Python Jargon

demonstration of, How Slicing Works

features of, Why Slices and Range Exclude the Last Item

multidimensional, Multidimensional Slicing and Ellipsis

slice objects, Slice Objects

snake_case, Python Jargon

sorting, list.sort and the sorted Built-In Function, Further Reading

special attributes, Special Attributes that Affect Attribute Handling

special methods

advantages of, A Pythonic Card Deck

alternate terms for, The Python Data Model

arithmetic operators, Arithmetic Operators, Overview of Special Methods

boolean value of custom types, Boolean Value of a Custom Type

built-in types, How Special Methods Are Used

definition of term, Python Jargon

emulating numeric types, Emulating Numeric Types

example of implementation, A Pythonic Card Deck, Emulating Numeric Types

for attribute handling, Special Methods for Attribute Handling

implicit nature of, How Special Methods Are Used

naming of, The Python Data Model

overview of available, Overview of Special Methods

purpose of, The Python Data Model

string representation, String Representation

use of, How Special Methods Are Used

square brackets ([]), A Pythonic Card Deck, List Comprehensions and Readability, Multidimensional Slicing and Ellipsis, Operator Overloading: Doing It Right

stacked decorators, Stacked Decorators

static type checking, Further Reading

staticmethod decorator, classmethod Versus staticmethod

storage attributes, LineItem Take #3: A Simple Descriptor, LineItem Take #4: Automatic Storage Attribute Names, Python Jargon

str argument, str Versus bytes in Regular Expressions

str function, How Special Methods Are Used, Object Representations

str.casefold() method, Case Folding

str.format method, String Representation, Formatted Displays

Strategy pattern, Case Study: Refactoring Strategy-Finding Strategies in a Module, Decorator-Enhanced Strategy Pattern

strings

concept of, Character Issues

representation of, String Representation, Further Reading, Object Representations

StrKeyDict, Subclassing UserDict

strong references, Python Jargon

strong vs. weak typing, Further Reading

struct module, Structs and Memory Views

subclasses

concrete, Subclassing an ABC, Subclassing the Tombola ABC

creating, Subclassing the Tombola ABC

declaring virtual, A Virtual Subclass of Tombola

pitfalls of subclassing, Subclassing Built-In Types Is Tricky

testing, How the Tombola Subclasses Were Tested

virtual, Geese Can Behave as Ducks, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication, Python Jargon

subgenerators, Using yield from

super() function, Vector Take #3: Dynamic Attribute Access

surrogateescape codec error handler, str Versus bytes on os Functions

SyntaxError, SyntaxError When Loading Modules with Unexpected Encoding

T

tables, Further Reading

Tasks, obtaining in asyncio, Yielding from Futures, Tasks, and Coroutines

text files, encoding/decoding, Handling Text Files-Encoding Defaults: A Madhouse

text matching, Utility Functions for Normalized Text Matching

thread-safe interpreters, Blocking I/O and the GIL

Threading module, Threading and Multiprocessing Alternatives, Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison

time.sleep(…), Thread Versus Coroutine: A Comparison

Timsort sorting algorithm, Further Reading

Tkinter GUI toolkit, Multiple Inheritance in the Real World, Tkinter: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

top-level code, What Happens When: Import Time Versus Runtime

TQDM package, Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling, Using futures.as_completed

traceback objects, Weak References

Trollius project, Concurrency with asyncio

truthiness, Boolean Value of a Custom Type, Python Jargon

try/else clause, Do This, Then That: else Blocks Beyond if

tuple unpacking

definition of term, Python Jargon

examples of, Tuple Unpacking

grabbing excess items, Using * to grab excess items

nested, Nested Tuple Unpacking

vs. iterable unpacking, Tuple Unpacking

tuples

building with generator expressions, Generator Expressions

named, Named Tuples

relative immutability of, The Relative Immutability of Tuples, Tricks Python Plays with Immutables

returning reference to, Tricks Python Plays with Immutables

sequence-like behavior of, Further Reading

used as immutable lists, Tuples as Immutable Lists

used as records, Tuples as Records

type hints, Further Reading

type metaclass, Metaclasses 101

type, definition of term, Python Jargon

t[:] operator, Tricks Python Plays with Immutables

U

unary operators, overloading of, Unary Operators

unbound methods, Multiple Inheritance and Method Resolution Order, Python Jargon

underscore (_), Tuple Unpacking, Private and “Protected” Attributes in Python

Unicode

canonical equivalents, Normalizing Unicode for Saner Comparisons

case folding, Case Folding

characters vs. byte representations, Character Issues

combining characters in, Normalizing Unicode for Saner Comparisons

compatibility characters, Normalizing Unicode for Saner Comparisons

database for, The Unicode Database

diacritics, Extreme “Normalization”: Taking Out Diacritics

imprecise qualifiers in, Further Reading

normalization of, Normalizing Unicode for Saner Comparisons

normalized text matching, Utility Functions for Normalized Text Matching

potential encoding/decoding errors, Understanding Encode/Decode Problems

sorting text, Sorting Unicode Text

SyntaxError, SyntaxError When Loading Modules with Unexpected Encoding

Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA), Sorting with the Unicode Collation Algorithm

Unicode sandwich, Handling Text Files

UnicodeDecodeError, Coping with UnicodeDecodeError

UnicodeEncodeError, Coping with UnicodeEncodeError

uniform access principle, Dynamic Attributes and Properties, Further Reading, Python Jargon

user-defined

callable types, User-Defined Callable Types

definition of term, Python Jargon

functions, The Seven Flavors of Callable Objects

UserDict, Subclassing UserDict

utf-16le encoding, Basic Encoders/Decoders

utf-8 encoding, Basic Encoders/Decoders

V

validation descriptors, Descriptor Usage Tips

variable scope rules, Variable Scope Rules

variables

as sticky notes, Variables Are Not Boxes

dummy, Tuple Unpacking

free, Closures

reference, Variables Are Not Boxes

vars([object]) function, Built-In Functions for Attribute Handling

vector addition, Overloading + for Vector Addition-Overloading + for Vector Addition

Vector space model, Sequence Hacking, Hashing, and Slicing

virtual subclasses, A Virtual Subclass of Tombola, Geese Can Behave as Ducks, Overloading * for Scalar Multiplication, Python Jargon

W

warts, definition of term, Python Jargon

weak references, Weak References, Python Jargon

weak vs. strong typing, Further Reading

WeakKeyDictionary class, The WeakValueDictionary Skit

weakref module, The WeakValueDictionary Skit

WeakValueDictionary class, The WeakValueDictionary Skit

web downloads

aiohttp web server, An aiohttp Web Server

asyncio TCP server, An asyncio TCP Server

concurrent vs. sequential, Example: Web Downloads in Three Styles

error handling for, Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling, Error Handling in the flags2 Examples

multiple requests for, Doing Multiple Requests for Each Download

progress displays, Downloads with Progress Display and Error Handling, Using futures.as_completed

with aiohttp package, Downloading with asyncio and aiohttp

while statements, Boolean Value of a Custom Type

while/else clause, Do This, Then That: else Blocks Beyond if

with statements

behavior of, Context Managers and else Blocks

context managers and, Context Managers and with Blocks

usefulness of, Further Reading

X

XOR operator (^), A Hashable Vector2d, Vector Take #4: Hashing and a Faster ==

Y

yield from construct

as for loop replacement, New Syntax in Python 3.3: yield from

in asyncio package, asyncio.Future: Nonblocking by Design, Downloading with asyncio and aiohttp

in Trollius project, Concurrency with asyncio

main feature of, Using yield from

meaning of, The Meaning of yield from

significance of, Further Reading

using, Using yield from-Using yield from

yield keyword

coroutines and, Basic Behavior of a Generator Used as a Coroutine

in generator functions, How a Generator Function Works

purpose of, Iterables, Iterators, and Generators, Coroutines

Trollius project and, Concurrency with asyncio

Z

zip function, Vector Take #4: Hashing and a Faster ==

About the Author

Luciano Ramalho was already a web developer before the Netscape IPO in 1995, and switched from Perl to Java to Python in 1998. Since then, he has worked on some of the largest news portals in Brazil using Python, and taught Python web development in the Brazilian media, banking, and government sectors. His speaking credentials include PyCon US (2013), OSCON (2002, 2013, 2014), and 15 talks over the years at PythonBrasil (the Brazilian PyCon) and FISL (the largest FLOSS conference in the Southern Hemisphere). Ramalho is a fellow of the Python Software Foundation and cofounder of Garoa Hacker Clube, the first hackerspace in Brazil. He is co-owner of Python.pro.br, a training company.

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