boolish

Parse a string into a boolean. A typed, dependency-free stand-in for distutils.util.strtobool, which was removed from the standard library in Python 3.12.

Install

pip install boolish

Usage

from boolish import strtobool

strtobool("yes")     # True
strtobool("Off")     # False
strtobool("  1 ")    # True  (space and case are ignored)
strtobool("maybe")   # ValueError

Give a default to get it back instead of an error:

strtobool("maybe", False)   # False

Read a flag straight from the environment. A missing variable falls back to the default; a set-but-nonsense value raises, so a misconfigured flag fails loudly:

from boolish import getenv_bool

getenv_bool("ENABLE_CACHE", False)

Bring your own vocabulary:

from boolish import BoolRules, strtobool

spanish = BoolRules(true={"sí", "verdadero"}, false={"no", "falso"})
strtobool("SÍ", rules=spanish)   # True

Why

The standard library's strtobool was the quiet default for reading boolean flags and environment variables. It was deprecated in 3.10 and removed in 3.12, and the dedicated packages that filled the gap have gone unmaintained for years. This is the same idea, kept small: real bool results, type hints, no dependencies, and the environment helper most projects ended up writing by hand.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Links

• Website — https://lianes8studio.com
• GitHub — https://github.com/JaviLianes8
• LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlianes/