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Assortment of Python helper functions and utility classes

Project description

CommonPy

This is a collection of common utility functions and classes that we at the Caltech Library have found useful in our other Python projects.

Latest release License Python DOI PyPI

Table of contents

Introduction

This repository does not constitute a single program; instead, it contains a collection of modules with utility functions and classes that we have found ourselves using repeatedly in other Python projects.

Installation

The instructions below assume you have a Python interpreter installed on your computer; if that's not the case, please first install Python version 3 and familiarize yourself with running Python programs on your system.

On Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems, you should be able to install commonpy with pip. To install commonpy from the Python package repository (PyPI), run the following command:

python3 -m pip install commonpy

As an alternative to getting it from PyPI, you can use pip to install commonpy directly from GitHub, like this:

python3 -m pip install git+https://github.com/caltechlibrary/commonpy.git

Usage

The basic approach to using this package is to import the modules and functions you need. For example:

from commonpy.file_utils import readable

if readable('/path/to/some/file'):
    # do something

The following subsections describe the different modules available.

Data utilities

The data_utils module provides a number of miscellaneous simple functions for some common operations on data of various kinds.

Function Purpose
unique(list) Takes a list and return a version without duplicates
ordinal(integer) Returns a string with the number followed by "st", "nd, "rd", or "th"
slice(list, n) Yields n number of slices from the list
timestamp() Returns a string for an easily-readable form of the current time and date
parsed_datetime(string) Returns a date object representing the given date string
pluralized(word, n, include_num) Returns a plural version of word if n > 1
expanded_range(string) Given a string of the form "X-Y", returns the list of integers it represents

File utilities

The file_utils module provides a number of miscellaneous simple functions for some common operations on files and directories.

Function Purpose
readable(dest) Returns True if file or directory dest is accessible and readable
writable(dest) Returns True if file or directory dest can be written
nonempty(file) Returns True if file file is not empty
relative(file) Returns a path string for file relative to the current directory
filename_basename(file) Returns file without any extensions
filename_extension(file) Returns the extension of filename file
alt_extension(file, ext) Returns file with the extension replaced by ext
rename_existing(file) Renames file to file.bak
delete_existing(file) Deletes the given file
copy_file(src, dst) Copies file from src to dst
open_file(file) Opens the file by calling the equivalent of "open" on this system
open_url(url) Opens the url in the user's default web browser
filter_by_extensions(list, endings)
files_in_directory(dir, ext, recursive)

Interruptible wait and interruption handling utilities

The interrupt module includes wait(...), a replacement for sleep(...) that is interruptible and works with multiple threads. It also provides methods to cause an interruption (including doing it by issuing a ^C to the program), check whether an interruption occurred, and other related operations.

Function Purpose
config_interrupt(callback, raise_ex, signal) Sets up a callback function
wait(duration) Waits for duration in an interruptible fashion
interrupt() Interrupts any wait in progress
interrupted() Returns True if an interruption has been called
raise_for_interrupts() Raises an exception if interrupt() has been invoked
reset() Resets the interruption flag

Module utilities

The module_utils collection of functions is useful for working with paths related to a running module, for example to find internal data files that might be needed for normal operation.

Function Purpose
desktop_path() Returns the path to the user's Desktop directory on this system
module_path(module_name) Returns the path to the installed module
installation_path(module_name) Returns the path to module's installation directory
datadir_path(module_name) Returns the path to the /data subdirectory of the module
config_path(module_name) Returns the path to local config data directory for the module

Function config_path(...) is useful to use in conjunction with Python's configparser module. It returns ~/.config/modulename/ on Unix-like systems.

Network utilities

The network_utils module provides several functions that are useful when performing network operations.

Function Purpose
network_available() Returns True if external hosts are reacheable over the network
scheme(url) Returns the protocol portion of the url; e.g., "https"
hostname(url) Returns the hostname portion of a URL
netlock(url) Returns the hostname, port number (if any), and login info (if any)
net(...) See below

net

The net function in the network_utils module implements a fairly high-level network operation interface that internally handles timeouts, rate limits, polling, HTTP/2, and more. The function signature is:

net(method, url, client = None, handle_rate = True, polling = False, recursing = 0, **kwargs)

The method parameter should have a value such as 'get', 'post', 'head', or similar. The function returns a tuple of (response, exception), where the first element is the response from the get or post HTTP call, and the second element is an exception object if an exception occurred. If no exception occurred, the second element will be None. This allows the caller to inspect the response even in cases where exceptions are raised.

If keyword client is not None, it's assumed to be a Python HTTPX Client object to use for the network call. Settings such as timeouts should be done by the caller creating appropriately-configured Client objects.

If keyword handle_rate is True, this function will automatically pause and retry if it receives an HTTP code 429 ("too many requests") from the server. If False, it will return the exception CommonPy.RateLimitExceeded instead.

If keyword polling is True, certain statuses like 404 are ignored and the response is returned; otherwise, they are considered errors. The behavior when True is useful in situations where a URL does not exist until something is ready at the server, and the caller is repeatedly checking the URL. It is up to the caller to implement the polling schedule and call this function (with polling = True) as needed.

This method always passes the argument allow_redirects = True to the underlying Python HTTPX library network calls.

String utilities

Function Purpose
antiformat(s) Quote instances of { and } in s so it can be passed to format.

System utilities

Function Purpose
system_profile() Returns a string describing the system running this Python program.

Exceptions

The CommonPy module defines a number of exceptions that it may return. (Most of the exceptions are potentially thrown by net, discussed above.)

Exception Meaning
CommonPyException Base class for CommonPy exceptions
Interrupted The user elected to cancel/quit the program
NetworkFailure Unrecoverable problem involving net
ServiceFailure Unrecoverable problem involving a remote service
AuthenticationFailure Problem obtaining or using authentication credentials
NoContent No content found at the given location
RateLimitExceeded The service flagged reports that its rate limits have been exceeded
InternalError Unrecoverable problem involving CommonPy itself

Getting help

If you find an issue, please submit it in the GitHub issue tracker for this repository.

Contributing

We would be happy to receive your help and participation with enhancing CommonPy! Please visit the guidelines for contributing for some tips on getting started.

License

Software produced by the Caltech Library is Copyright (C) 2020, Caltech. This software is freely distributed under a BSD/MIT type license. Please see the LICENSE file for more information.

Authors and history

Mike Hucka started this collection of utilities sometime in 2018.

Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the California Institute of Technology Library.

The vector artwork of a toolbox, used as the icon for this repository, was created by priyanka from the Noun Project. It is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY 3.0 license.

CommonPy makes use of numerous open-source packages, without which it would have been effectively impossible to develop CommonPy with the resources we had. I want to acknowledge this debt. In alphabetical order, the packages are:

  • boltons – package of miscellaneous Python utilities
  • dateparser – parse dates in almost any string format
  • h2 – HTTP/2 support library used by HTTPX
  • httpx – Python HTTP client library that supports HTTP/2
  • humanize – make numbers more easily readable by humans
  • ipdb – the IPython debugger
  • pytest – testing framework for Python
  • python_dateutil – date utilities
  • PyYAML – Python YAML parser
  • sidetrack – simple debug logging/tracing package
  • tldextract – module to parse domains from URLs

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