littletree 0.4.0

Tree library

LittleTree is a library that provides a tree data structure to python. The package is purely written in python. It should be easy to use while efficient.

Installing

• Use pip to install littletree:

$ pip install --upgrade littletree

Usage

A tree can be used in a similar way as a dict:

from littletree import Node

tree = Node(identifier="World")
tree["Asia"] = Node()
tree["Africa"] = Node()
tree["America"] = Node()
tree["Europe"] = Node()

tree.show()  # Same as print(tree.to_string())
tree.to_image().show()  # Show as an image instead

The resulting tree is printed like this:

World
├─ Asia
├─ Africa
├─ America
└─ Europe

And it creates the following image:

See tutorial for more information.

Limitations

• Each node has a single parent
• A node can't have a sibling with the same identifier

Alternatives

Before creating this, I looked at some other tree libraries. I found the others to be lacking, because they were either slow or made simple things complicated. Therefore, I decided to make my own.

• anytree - Very hackable, but generally slow.
• bigtree - Similar to anytree, but has more features.
• itertree - Has many features and good performance, but has a complicated design.
• treelib - This puts all nodes of a tree into a single dict. This makes some operations difficult or slow, although it has advantages too.
• networkx - Is actually made for graphing. Doesn't have a dedicated tree type.