uxf 0.27.0

A pure Python library supporting Uniform eXchange Format, a plain text human readable optionally typed storage format.

Python UXF Library

For details of the Uniform eXchange Format (UXF) supported by this library, see the UXF Overview. (PyPI link to UXF Overview.)

The Python uxf library works out of the box with the standard library, and will use dateutil if available.

• Install: python3 -m pip install uxf
• Run: python3 -m uxf -h # this shows the command line help
• Use: import uxf # see the uxf.py module docs for the API

Most Python types convert losslessly to and from UXF types. In particular:

Python Type	UXF type
None	null
bool	bool
int	int
float	real
datetime.date	date
datetime.datetime	datetime
str	str
bytes	bytes
bytearray	bytes
uxf.List	list
uxf.Map	map
uxf.Table	table

A uxf.List is a Python collections.UserList subclass with .data (the list), .comment and .vtype attributes. Similarly a uxf.Map is a Python collections.UserDict subclass with .data (the dict), .comment, .ktype, and .vtype attributes. The uxf.Table class has .records, .comment, and .fields attributes; with .fields holding a list of uxf.Field values (which each has a field name and type). In all cases a type of None signifies that any type valid for the context may be used.

For complex numbers you could create a ttype such as: = Complex Real real Imag real. Then you could include single complex values like (Complex 1.5 7.2), or many of them such as (Complex 1.5 7.2 8.3 -9.4 14.8 0.6).

For custom types (e.g., enums; or as an alternative to using a ttype for complex numbers, or for any other custom type), use uxf.add_converter(). See test_converters.py for examples.

For collection types such as set, frozenset, tuple, or collections.deque, either manually convert to/from a List, or set uxf.AutoConvertSequences = True, in which case any of these will be automatically converted to a List when they are encountered. Of course, these are one way conversions.

Using uxf as an executable (with python3 -m uxf ...) provides a means of doing .uxf to .uxf conversions (e.g., compress or uncompress, or make more human readable or more compact).

Installed alongside uxf.py is uxfconvert.py which might prove useful to see how to use uxf. For example, uxfconvert.py can losslessly convert .uxf to .json or .xml and back. It can also do some simple conversions to and from .csv, to .ini, and to and from .sqlite, but these are really to illustrate use of the uxf APIs. And also see the ../t/* test files and the ../eg folder (for example, the ../eg/slides.uxf and ../eg/slides.py files).

If you just want to create a small standalone .pyz, simply copy py/uxf.py as uxf.py into your project folder and inlude it in your .pyz file.