snippyts

Miscellaneous utility scripts and Python objects for agile development.

1. Table of objects
2. Change log
3. Instructions for running tests

Table of objects

Deprecated

Change log

2026 AUG

Functions

1. Adds snippyts.__init__.is_nothing, a function that verifies whether an input expresses no useful information (empty strings/collections, zero, None, NaN, or Boolean values).
2. Adds snippyts.__init__.timestamp, a function returning a standard-format timestamp string (YYYYMMDD or YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS), defaulting to execution time.
3. Adds snippyts.__init__.stripstring, a function that cleans an input string via lowercasing, ASCII transliteration, non-alphanumeric stripping, blank collapsing, and whitespace collapsing.

Text Preprocessing

1. Adds snippyts.preprocessing.Text, a class with class methods for tokenizing, word-extracting, and sentence-splitting strings (or collections of strings) using NLTK.

Documentation

1. Adds docstrings to all functions.

Testing

1. Adds tests for new features.
2. Fixes failures in obsolete tests.

Fixes

1. Returns null instead of raising an exception.
2. Cleans up code.

2026 APR

Caching & Persistence

1. Adds snippyts.cachionary.Cachionary, a class implementing a caching dictionary with automatic disk persistence (JSON or pickle format) and atexit-based serialization.

2025 NOV

Networking

1. Removed gtml function for scraping as most sites tend to block it and ends up not working unless more advanced authentication is implemented.

NLP & ML

1. Fixes snippyts.trie.Trie.
2. Fixes snippyts.preprocessing.KBinsEncoder.
3. Adds snippyts.metrics.average_token_similarity, a function for calculating the average token similarity between two strings.

I/O Functions

3. Adds snippyts.__init__.to_yaml, a function for writing out YAML-formatted data.
4. Adds snippyts.__init__.from_yaml, a function that reads in YAML-formatted data into a Python dictionary.
5. Adds snippyts.__init__.read_arg, a function that returns the value of a specified command-line parameter name (names are those starting with - or --).
6. Adds snippyts.__init__.read_args, like read_arg but for applies implicitly to all parameters and returns their arguments as values in a namedtuple, with the parameter name as the attributes.

System & Language

2. Adds snippyts.__init__.cp, a shorthand for copy.deepcopy.
3. Adds snippyts.__init__.smart_cast_number, a function for casting a numeric value to an integer if it is numerically whole; otherwise, return as float.
4. Adds snippyts.__init__.is_number, a function that checks whether a string can be interpreted as a integer or a float.
5. Adds snippyts.__init__.defolder, a function that handles path strings and creates folders if they do not exist yet.
6. Adds snippyts.__init__.UnsupportedInputShapeError, an exception for handling unsupported input shapes.

Running tests

Using pytest

Change into the project's home folder (first line below) and run pytest (second line). After moving into that directory, the working folder should contain two subfolders, src (in turn the parent of subfolder snippyts) and tests:

cd snippyts ;
pytest tests ;

Running the module as a package

cd snippyts ;
python -m src.snippyts.__init__ ;
python -m src.snippyts.preprocessing ;