morecopy

Copy even immutable objects as much as possible

Overview

morecopy is a Python package that enables copy of immutable objects so that a copied object is equivalent but not identical to the original:

from morecopy import copy


original = 1234567890
copied = copy(original)

original == copied # -> True
original is copied # -> False

Note In general, there is no need to copy immutable objects, so this package may not be necessary in most cases. Also, some objects may not be copied even with this package: In CPython, for example, integers from -5 to 256 are always uncopied for optimization.

Installation

$ pip install morecopy

Supported immutable types

The following types are supported. For mutable types (e.g. list) or unsupported immutable types (e.g. bool, NoneType), morecopy.copy and morecopy.deepcopy are equivalent to copy.copy and copy.deepcopy, respectively.

Custom immutable copier

Users can add a custom copy function (copier) for a type. For example, the following code defines copy of integer by creating a copy function and registering it by the copier_for decorator.

from morecopy import copier_for


@copier_for(int)
def copy_int(integer: int) -> int:
    return eval(repr(integer))