flats 0.3.0

Minimal library that enables flattening of nested instances of container types.

Minimal library that enables flattening of nested instances of container types.

Package Installation and Usage

The package is available on PyPI:

python -m pip install flats

The library can be imported in the usual ways:

import flats
from flats import flats

Examples

This library provides a function that can flatten any instance of a container type that is the root of a tree of nested instances of container types, returning as an iterable the sequence of all objects or values (that are not of a container type) encountered during an in-order traversal. Any instance of the Iterable class or of the GeneratorType type is considered to be an instance of a container type by this library:

>>> from flats import flats
>>> list(flats([[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6, 7]]))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

The nested instances need not be of the same type:

>>> tuple(flats([{1}, {2}, {3}, frozenset({4}), iter([5, 6, 7])]))
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
>>> list(flats(['abc', 'xyz']))
['a', 'b', 'c', 'x', 'y', 'z']
>>> list(flats([range(3), range(3)]))
[0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2]

It is also possible to limit the depth to which nested instances of a container type are recursively traversed:

>>> list(flats([[[1, 2], 3], [4, 5, 6, 7]], depth=1))
[[1, 2], 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
>>> list(flats([[[1, 2], 3], [4, 5, 6, 7]], depth=2))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
>>> list(flats([[[1, [2]], 3], [4, [[[5]]], 6, 7]], depth=float('inf')))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

Documentation

The documentation can be generated automatically from the source files using Sphinx:

cd docs
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
sphinx-apidoc -f -E --templatedir=_templates -o _source .. ../setup.py && make html

Testing and Conventions

All unit tests are executed and their coverage is measured when using pytest (see setup.cfg for configuration details):

python -m pip install pytest pytest-cov
python -m pytest

Alternatively, all unit tests are included in the module itself and can be executed using doctest:

python flats/flats.py -v

Style conventions are enforced using Pylint:

python -m pip install pylint
python -m pylint flats

Contributions

In order to contribute to the source code, open an issue or submit a pull request on the GitHub page for this library.

Versioning

Beginning with version 0.1.0, the version number format for this library and the changes to the library associated with version number increments conform with Semantic Versioning 2.0.0.

Publishing

This library can be published as a package on PyPI by a package maintainer. Install the wheel package, remove any old build/distribution files, and package the source into a distribution archive:

python -m pip install wheel
rm -rf dist *.egg-info
python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel

Next, install the twine package and upload the package distribution archive to PyPI:

python -m pip install twine
python -m twine upload dist/*