amyreese / ent

Python library for creating arbitrary data structs

ent

ent is a basic framework for generating attribute-based data structures from dictionary-like data sources:

> from ent import Ent

> obj = Ent(foo='foo', bar=None)

> obj.foo
u'foo'

> obj.bar
None

ent can contain arbitrarily-nested hierarchies, as long as every node/leaf is either a primitive type, or an ent:

> obj = Ent({
    'foo': 'bar',
    'list': [1, 2, 3, 4],
    'inner': {
        'foo': 'baz',
        'bar': 'bang',
        },
    'ent': Ent(foo='bar'),
    })

> obj.foo
u'bar'

> obj.list[2]
3

> obj.inner.foo
u'baz'

ent can be merged and diffed, and it will even enforce types when merging keys that are shared:

> ent1 = Ent(foo=1, bar=True)

> ent2 = Ent(foo='hi', bar=False, goo='win')

> Ent.merge(ent1, ent2)
<Ent {'foo': 1, 'bar': False}>

> Ent.diff(ent1, ent2)
<Ent {'bar': False}>

ent even provides a stand-in for the json and yaml modules to automatically convert to and from Ent objects and raw JSON/YAML:

> from ent import json, yaml

> json.loads('{"foo": true, "bar": null}')
<Ent {'foo': True, 'bar': None}>

> json.dumps(Ent(foo=True, bar=None))
u'{"foo": true, "bar": null}'

> yaml.safe_load('bar: null\nfoo: true\n')
<Ent {'foo': True, 'bar': None}>

> yaml.dump(Ent(foo=True, bar=None))
u'baz: 1\nfoo: bar\n'

why

When working with configs, or other content pulled from sources like JSON, it can be really annoying to need to constantly use brackets to access nested data structures.

Let's say we have a small JSON file containing my personal profile:

{
    "name": "John Reese",
    "urls": {
        "blog": "https://noswap.com",
        "github": "https://github.com/jreese",
        "facebook": "https://www.facebook.com/nucleareclipse"
    }
}

Now let's read in that data and print some of it out using the standard json module:

import json

with open(...) as f:
    data = json.load(f)

name = data['name']
url = data['urls']['github']

We can do better with ent:

from ent import json

with open(...) as f:
    data = json.load(f)

name = data.name
url = data.urls.github

install

ent is compatible with Python 2.7+ and Python 3.3+. You can install it from PyPI with the following command:

$ pip install ent

license

ent is copyright 2015 John Reese, and is licensed under the MIT license.