colaborati / boltons

Like builtins, but boltons. Constructs/recipes/snippets that would be handy in the standard library. Nothing like Michael Bolton.

Boltons

boltons should be builtins.

Boltons is a set of over 100 BSD-licensed, pure-Python utilities in the same spirit as — and yet conspicuously missing from — the standard library, including:

• Atomic file saving, bolted on with fileutils
• A highly-optimized OrderedMultiDict, in dictutils
• Two types of PriorityQueue, in queueutils
• Chunked and windowed iteration, in iterutils
• A full-featured TracebackInfo type, for representing stack traces, in tbutils

Boltons is tested against Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.4, and PyPy. Full and extensive docs are available on Read The Docs.

Installation

Boltons can be added to a project in a few ways. There's the obvious one::

    pip install boltons

Then dozens of boltons are just an import away::

    from boltons.cacheutils import LRU
    my_cache = LRU()

However, due to the nature of utilities, application developers might want to consider other options. Boltons is pure-Python and has no dependencies. See the Integration section of the docs for more details.

Third-party packages

The majority of boltons strive to be "good enough" for a wide range of basic uses, leaving advanced use cases to Python's myriad specialized 3rd-party libraries. In many cases the respective boltons module will describe 3rd-party alternatives worth investigating when use cases outgrow boltons. If you've found a natural "next-step" library worth mentioning, see the next section!

Gaps

Found something missing in the standard library that should be in boltons? Found something missing in boltons? First, take a moment to read the very brief architecture statement to make sure the functionality would be a good fit.

Then, if you are very motivated, submit a Pull Request. Otherwise, submit a short feature request on the Issues page, and we will figure something out.