Spans 0.1.0

Continuous set support for Python

Spans is a pure Python implementation of PostgreSQL’s range types [1]. Range types are conveinent when working with intervals of any kind. Every time you’ve found yourself working with date_start and date_end, an interval may have been what you were looking for.

If you are making a booking application for a bed and breakfast hotel and want to ensure no room gets double booked:

from collections import defaultdict
from datetime import date
from spans import daterange

# Add a booking from 2013-01-14 through 2013-01-15
bookings = defaultdict(list, {
    1 : [daterange(date(2013, 1, 14), date(2013, 1, 16))]
}

def is_valid_booking(bookings, room, new_booking):
    return not any(booking.overlap(new_booking for booking in bookings[room])

print is_valid_booking(
    bookings, 1, daterange(date(2013, 1, 14), date(2013, 1, 18))) # False
print is_valid_booking(
    bookings, 1, daterange(date(2013, 1, 16), date(2013, 1, 18))) # True

The library supports ranges and sets of ranges. A range has no discontinuities between its endpoints. For some applications this is a requirement and hence the rangeset type exists.

Apart from the above mentioned overlap operation; ranges support union, difference, intersection, contains, startswith, endswith, left_of and right_of.

Built-in ranges:

• intrange

• floatrange

• strrangerange - For unicode strings

• daterange

• datetimerange

• timedeltarange

For each one of the range types a rangeset type exists as well:

• intrangeset

• floatrangeset

• strrangerangeset

• daterangeset

• datetimerangeset

• timedeltarangeset

Motivation

For a recent project of mine I started using PostgreSQL’s tsrange type and needed an equivalent in Python. These range types attempt to mimick PostgreSQL’s behavior in every way. Deviating from it is considered as a bug and should be reported.

Installation

Spans exists on PyPI.

pip install Spans

Documentation

For full doumentation please run pydoc spans from a shell.

Custom range types

Using your own types for ranges are easy, just extend a base class and you’re good to go:

from spans.types import range_, discreterange
from spans.settypes import rangeset, discreterangeset

class intrange(discreterange):
    __slots__ = ()
    type = int
    step = 1

class intrangeset(discreterangeset):
    __slots__ = ()
    type = intrange

class floatrange(range_):
    __slots__ = ()
    type = float

class floatrangeset(rangeset):
    __slots__ = ()
    type = floatrange

For a deeper set of examples please refer to types.py and settypes.py.

[1]

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/rangetypes.html