kbe/src/lib/python/Doc/whatsnew/2.7.rst
What's New in Python 2.7
:Author: A.M. Kuchling (amk at amk.ca)
.. hyperlink all the methods & functions.
.. T_STRING_INPLACE not described in main docs
.. $Id$ Rules for maintenance:
Anyone can add text to this document. Do not spend very much time on the wording of your changes, because your text will probably get rewritten to some degree.
The maintainer will go through Misc/NEWS periodically and add changes; it's therefore more important to add your changes to Misc/NEWS than to this file.
This is not a complete list of every single change; completeness is the purpose of Misc/NEWS. Some changes I consider too small or esoteric to include. If such a change is added to the text, I'll just remove it. (This is another reason you shouldn't spend too much time on writing your addition.)
If you want to draw your new text to the attention of the maintainer, add 'XXX' to the beginning of the paragraph or section.
It's OK to just add a fragmentary note about a change. For example: "XXX Describe the transmogrify() function added to the socket module." The maintainer will research the change and write the necessary text.
You can comment out your additions if you like, but it's not necessary (especially when a final release is some months away).
Credit the author of a patch or bugfix. Just the name is sufficient; the e-mail address isn't necessary.
It's helpful to add the bug/patch number in a parenthetical comment.
XXX Describe the transmogrify() function added to the socket
module.
(Contributed by P.Y. Developer; :issue:12345.)
This saves the maintainer some effort going through the SVN logs when researching a change.
This article explains the new features in Python 2.7. Python 2.7 was released on July 3, 2010.
Numeric handling has been improved in many ways, for both
floating-point numbers and for the :class:~decimal.Decimal class.
There are some useful additions to the standard library, such as a
greatly enhanced :mod:unittest module, the :mod:argparse module
for parsing command-line options, convenient :class:~collections.OrderedDict
and :class:~collections.Counter classes in the :mod:collections module,
and many other improvements.
Python 2.7 is planned to be the last of the 2.x releases, so we worked on making it a good release for the long term. To help with porting to Python 3, several new features from the Python 3.x series have been included in 2.7.
This article doesn't attempt to provide a complete specification of the new features, but instead provides a convenient overview. For full details, you should refer to the documentation for Python 2.7 at https://docs.python.org. If you want to understand the rationale for the design and implementation, refer to the PEP for a particular new feature or the issue on https://bugs.python.org in which a change was discussed. Whenever possible, "What's New in Python" links to the bug/patch item for each change.
.. _whatsnew27-python31:
Python 2.7 is the last major release in the 2.x series, as the Python maintainers have shifted the focus of their new feature development efforts to the Python 3.x series. This means that while Python 2 continues to receive bug fixes, and to be updated to build correctly on new hardware and versions of supported operated systems, there will be no new full feature releases for the language or standard library.
However, while there is a large common subset between Python 2.7 and Python 3, and many of the changes involved in migrating to that common subset, or directly to Python 3, can be safely automated, some other changes (notably those associated with Unicode handling) may require careful consideration, and preferably robust automated regression test suites, to migrate effectively.
This means that Python 2.7 will remain in place for a long time, providing a
stable and supported base platform for production systems that have not yet
been ported to Python 3. The full expected lifecycle of the Python 2.7
series is detailed in :pep:373.
Some key consequences of the long-term significance of 2.7 are:
As noted above, the 2.7 release has a much longer period of maintenance when compared to earlier 2.x versions. Python 2.7 is currently expected to remain supported by the core development team (receiving security updates and other bug fixes) until at least 2020 (10 years after its initial release, compared to the more typical support period of 18--24 months).
As the Python 2.7 standard library ages, making effective use of the
Python Package Index (either directly or via a redistributor) becomes
more important for Python 2 users. In addition to a wide variety of third
party packages for various tasks, the available packages include backports
of new modules and features from the Python 3 standard library that are
compatible with Python 2, as well as various tools and libraries that can
make it easier to migrate to Python 3. The Python Packaging User Guide <https://packaging.python.org>__ provides guidance on downloading and
installing software from the Python Package Index.
While the preferred approach to enhancing Python 2 is now the publication
of new packages on the Python Package Index, this approach doesn't
necessarily work in all cases, especially those related to network
security. In exceptional cases that cannot be handled adequately by
publishing new or updated packages on PyPI, the Python Enhancement
Proposal process may be used to make the case for adding new features
directly to the Python 2 standard library. Any such additions, and the
maintenance releases where they were added, will be noted in the
:ref:py27-maintenance-enhancements section below.
For projects wishing to migrate from Python 2 to Python 3, or for library
and framework developers wishing to support users on both Python 2 and
Python 3, there are a variety of tools and guides available to help decide
on a suitable approach and manage some of the technical details involved.
The recommended starting point is the :ref:pyporting-howto HOWTO guide.
For Python 2.7, a policy decision was made to silence warnings only of
interest to developers by default. :exc:DeprecationWarning and its
descendants are now ignored unless otherwise requested, preventing
users from seeing warnings triggered by an application. This change
was also made in the branch that became Python 3.2. (Discussed
on stdlib-sig and carried out in :issue:7319.)
In previous releases, :exc:DeprecationWarning messages were
enabled by default, providing Python developers with a clear
indication of where their code may break in a future major version
of Python.
However, there are increasingly many users of Python-based
applications who are not directly involved in the development of
those applications. :exc:DeprecationWarning messages are
irrelevant to such users, making them worry about an application
that's actually working correctly and burdening application developers
with responding to these concerns.
You can re-enable display of :exc:DeprecationWarning messages by
running Python with the :option:-Wdefault <-W> (short form:
:option:-Wd <-W>) switch, or by setting the :envvar:PYTHONWARNINGS
environment variable to "default" (or "d") before running
Python. Python code can also re-enable them
by calling warnings.simplefilter('default').
The unittest module also automatically reenables deprecation warnings
when running tests.
Much as Python 2.6 incorporated features from Python 3.0, version 2.7 incorporates some of the new features in Python 3.1. The 2.x series continues to provide tools for migrating to the 3.x series.
A partial list of 3.1 features that were backported to 2.7:
{1,2,3} is a mutable set).{i: i*2 for i in range(3)}).with statement.io library, rewritten in C for performance.pep-0372."," format specifier described in :ref:pep-0378.memoryview object.importlib module,
described below <#importlib-section>__.repr of a float x is shorter in many cases: it's now
based on the shortest decimal string that's guaranteed to round back
to x. As in previous versions of Python, it's guaranteed that
float(repr(x)) recovers x.round function is also now correctly rounded.PyCapsule type, used to provide a C API for extension modules.PyLong_AsLongAndOverflow C API function.Other new Python3-mode warnings include:
operator.isCallable and :func:operator.sequenceIncludes,
which are not supported in 3.x, now trigger warnings.!-3 switch now automatically
enables the :option:!-Qwarn switch that causes warnings
about using classic division with integers and long integers... ======================================================================== .. Large, PEP-level features and changes should be described here. .. ========================================================================
.. _pep-0372:
Regular Python dictionaries iterate over key/value pairs in arbitrary order.
Over the years, a number of authors have written alternative implementations
that remember the order that the keys were originally inserted. Based on
the experiences from those implementations, 2.7 introduces a new
:class:~collections.OrderedDict class in the :mod:collections module.
The :class:~collections.OrderedDict API provides the same interface as regular
dictionaries but iterates over keys and values in a guaranteed order
depending on when a key was first inserted::
>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> d = OrderedDict([('first', 1),
... ('second', 2),
... ('third', 3)])
>>> d.items()
[('first', 1), ('second', 2), ('third', 3)]
If a new entry overwrites an existing entry, the original insertion position is left unchanged::
>>> d['second'] = 4
>>> d.items()
[('first', 1), ('second', 4), ('third', 3)]
Deleting an entry and reinserting it will move it to the end::
>>> del d['second']
>>> d['second'] = 5
>>> d.items()
[('first', 1), ('third', 3), ('second', 5)]
The :meth:~collections.OrderedDict.popitem method has an optional last
argument that defaults to True. If last is true, the most recently
added key is returned and removed; if it's false, the
oldest key is selected::
>>> od = OrderedDict([(x,0) for x in range(20)])
>>> od.popitem()
(19, 0)
>>> od.popitem()
(18, 0)
>>> od.popitem(last=False)
(0, 0)
>>> od.popitem(last=False)
(1, 0)
Comparing two ordered dictionaries checks both the keys and values, and requires that the insertion order was the same::
>>> od1 = OrderedDict([('first', 1),
... ('second', 2),
... ('third', 3)])
>>> od2 = OrderedDict([('third', 3),
... ('first', 1),
... ('second', 2)])
>>> od1 == od2
False
>>> # Move 'third' key to the end
>>> del od2['third']; od2['third'] = 3
>>> od1 == od2
True
Comparing an :class:~collections.OrderedDict with a regular dictionary
ignores the insertion order and just compares the keys and values.
How does the :class:~collections.OrderedDict work? It maintains a
doubly-linked list of keys, appending new keys to the list as they're inserted.
A secondary dictionary maps keys to their corresponding list node, so
deletion doesn't have to traverse the entire linked list and therefore
remains O(1).
The standard library now supports use of ordered dictionaries in several modules.
The :mod:ConfigParser module uses them by default, meaning that
configuration files can now be read, modified, and then written back
in their original order.
The :meth:~collections.somenamedtuple._asdict() method for
:func:collections.namedtuple now returns an ordered dictionary with the
values appearing in the same order as the underlying tuple indices.
The :mod:json module's :class:~json.JSONDecoder class
constructor was extended with an object_pairs_hook parameter to
allow :class:OrderedDict instances to be built by the decoder.
Support was also added for third-party tools like
PyYAML <http://pyyaml.org/>_.
.. seealso::
:pep:372 - Adding an ordered dictionary to collections
PEP written by Armin Ronacher and Raymond Hettinger;
implemented by Raymond Hettinger.
.. _pep-0378:
To make program output more readable, it can be useful to add separators to large numbers, rendering them as 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 instead of 18446744073709551616.
The fully general solution for doing this is the :mod:locale module,
which can use different separators ("," in North America, "." in
Europe) and different grouping sizes, but :mod:locale is complicated
to use and unsuitable for multi-threaded applications where different
threads are producing output for different locales.
Therefore, a simple comma-grouping mechanism has been added to the
mini-language used by the :meth:str.format method. When
formatting a floating-point number, simply include a comma between the
width and the precision::
'{:20,.2f}'.format(18446744073709551616.0) '18,446,744,073,709,551,616.00'
When formatting an integer, include the comma after the width:
'{:20,d}'.format(18446744073709551616) '18,446,744,073,709,551,616'
This mechanism is not adaptable at all; commas are always used as the
separator and the grouping is always into three-digit groups. The
comma-formatting mechanism isn't as general as the :mod:locale
module, but it's easier to use.
.. seealso::
:pep:378 - Format Specifier for Thousands Separator
PEP written by Raymond Hettinger; implemented by Eric Smith.
The :mod:argparse module for parsing command-line arguments was
added as a more powerful replacement for the
:mod:optparse module.
This means Python now supports three different modules for parsing
command-line arguments: :mod:getopt, :mod:optparse, and
:mod:argparse. The :mod:getopt module closely resembles the C
library's :c:func:getopt function, so it remains useful if you're writing a
Python prototype that will eventually be rewritten in C.
:mod:optparse becomes redundant, but there are no plans to remove it
because there are many scripts still using it, and there's no
automated way to update these scripts. (Making the :mod:argparse
API consistent with :mod:optparse's interface was discussed but
rejected as too messy and difficult.)
In short, if you're writing a new script and don't need to worry
about compatibility with earlier versions of Python, use
:mod:argparse instead of :mod:optparse.
Here's an example::
import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Command-line example.')
# Add optional switches
parser.add_argument('-v', action='store_true', dest='is_verbose',
help='produce verbose output')
parser.add_argument('-o', action='store', dest='output',
metavar='FILE',
help='direct output to FILE instead of stdout')
parser.add_argument('-C', action='store', type=int, dest='context',
metavar='NUM', default=0,
help='display NUM lines of added context')
# Allow any number of additional arguments.
parser.add_argument(nargs='*', action='store', dest='inputs',
help='input filenames (default is stdin)')
args = parser.parse_args()
print args.__dict__
Unless you override it, :option:!-h and :option:!--help switches
are automatically added, and produce neatly formatted output::
-> ./python.exe argparse-example.py --help
usage: argparse-example.py [-h] [-v] [-o FILE] [-C NUM] [inputs [inputs ...]]
Command-line example.
positional arguments:
inputs input filenames (default is stdin)
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-v produce verbose output
-o FILE direct output to FILE instead of stdout
-C NUM display NUM lines of added context
As with :mod:optparse, the command-line switches and arguments
are returned as an object with attributes named by the dest parameters::
-> ./python.exe argparse-example.py -v
{'output': None,
'is_verbose': True,
'context': 0,
'inputs': []}
-> ./python.exe argparse-example.py -v -o /tmp/output -C 4 file1 file2
{'output': '/tmp/output',
'is_verbose': True,
'context': 4,
'inputs': ['file1', 'file2']}
:mod:argparse has much fancier validation than :mod:optparse; you
can specify an exact number of arguments as an integer, 0 or more
arguments by passing '*', 1 or more by passing '+', or an
optional argument with '?'. A top-level parser can contain
sub-parsers to define subcommands that have different sets of
switches, as in svn commit, svn checkout, etc. You can
specify an argument's type as :class:~argparse.FileType, which will
automatically open files for you and understands that '-' means
standard input or output.
.. seealso::
:mod:argparse documentation
The documentation page of the argparse module.
:ref:upgrading-optparse-code
Part of the Python documentation, describing how to convert
code that uses :mod:optparse.
:pep:389 - argparse - New Command Line Parsing Module
PEP written and implemented by Steven Bethard.
The :mod:logging module is very flexible; applications can define
a tree of logging subsystems, and each logger in this tree can filter
out certain messages, format them differently, and direct messages to
a varying number of handlers.
All this flexibility can require a lot of configuration. You can
write Python statements to create objects and set their properties,
but a complex set-up requires verbose but boring code.
:mod:logging also supports a :func:~logging.fileConfig
function that parses a file, but the file format doesn't support
configuring filters, and it's messier to generate programmatically.
Python 2.7 adds a :func:~logging.dictConfig function that
uses a dictionary to configure logging. There are many ways to
produce a dictionary from different sources: construct one with code;
parse a file containing JSON; or use a YAML parsing library if one is
installed. For more information see :ref:logging-config-api.
The following example configures two loggers, the root logger and a
logger named "network". Messages sent to the root logger will be
sent to the system log using the syslog protocol, and messages
to the "network" logger will be written to a :file:network.log file
that will be rotated once the log reaches 1MB.
::
import logging
import logging.config
configdict = {
'version': 1, # Configuration schema in use; must be 1 for now
'formatters': {
'standard': {
'format': ('%(asctime)s %(name)-15s '
'%(levelname)-8s %(message)s')}},
'handlers': {'netlog': {'backupCount': 10,
'class': 'logging.handlers.RotatingFileHandler',
'filename': '/logs/network.log',
'formatter': 'standard',
'level': 'INFO',
'maxBytes': 1000000},
'syslog': {'class': 'logging.handlers.SysLogHandler',
'formatter': 'standard',
'level': 'ERROR'}},
# Specify all the subordinate loggers
'loggers': {
'network': {
'handlers': ['netlog']
}
},
# Specify properties of the root logger
'root': {
'handlers': ['syslog']
},
}
# Set up configuration
logging.config.dictConfig(configdict)
# As an example, log two error messages
logger = logging.getLogger('/')
logger.error('Database not found')
netlogger = logging.getLogger('network')
netlogger.error('Connection failed')
Three smaller enhancements to the :mod:logging module, all
implemented by Vinay Sajip, are:
.. rev79293
The :class:~logging.handlers.SysLogHandler class now supports
syslogging over TCP. The constructor has a socktype parameter
giving the type of socket to use, either :const:socket.SOCK_DGRAM
for UDP or :const:socket.SOCK_STREAM for TCP. The default
protocol remains UDP.
:class:~logging.Logger instances gained a :meth:~logging.Logger.getChild
method that retrieves a descendant logger using a relative path.
For example, once you retrieve a logger by doing log = getLogger('app'),
calling log.getChild('network.listen') is equivalent to
getLogger('app.network.listen').
The :class:~logging.LoggerAdapter class gained an
:meth:~logging.LoggerAdapter.isEnabledFor method that takes a
level and returns whether the underlying logger would
process a message of that level of importance.
.. XXX: Logger objects don't have a class declaration so the link don't work
.. seealso::
:pep:391 - Dictionary-Based Configuration For Logging
PEP written and implemented by Vinay Sajip.
The dictionary methods :meth:~dict.keys, :meth:~dict.values, and
:meth:~dict.items are different in Python 3.x. They return an object
called a :dfn:view instead of a fully materialized list.
It's not possible to change the return values of :meth:~dict.keys,
:meth:~dict.values, and :meth:~dict.items in Python 2.7 because
too much code would break. Instead the 3.x versions were added
under the new names :meth:~dict.viewkeys, :meth:~dict.viewvalues,
and :meth:~dict.viewitems.
::
>>> d = dict((i*10, chr(65+i)) for i in range(26))
>>> d
{0: 'A', 130: 'N', 10: 'B', 140: 'O', 20: ..., 250: 'Z'}
>>> d.viewkeys()
dict_keys([0, 130, 10, 140, 20, 150, 30, ..., 250])
Views can be iterated over, but the key and item views also behave
like sets. The & operator performs intersection, and |
performs a union::
>>> d1 = dict((i*10, chr(65+i)) for i in range(26))
>>> d2 = dict((i**.5, i) for i in range(1000))
>>> d1.viewkeys() & d2.viewkeys()
set([0.0, 10.0, 20.0, 30.0])
>>> d1.viewkeys() | range(0, 30)
set([0, 1, 130, 3, 4, 5, 6, ..., 120, 250])
The view keeps track of the dictionary and its contents change as the dictionary is modified::
>>> vk = d.viewkeys()
>>> vk
dict_keys([0, 130, 10, ..., 250])
>>> d[260] = '&'
>>> vk
dict_keys([0, 130, 260, 10, ..., 250])
However, note that you can't add or remove keys while you're iterating over the view::
>>> for k in vk:
... d[k*2] = k
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
RuntimeError: dictionary changed size during iteration
You can use the view methods in Python 2.x code, and the 2to3
converter will change them to the standard :meth:~dict.keys,
:meth:~dict.values, and :meth:~dict.items methods.
.. seealso::
:pep:3106 - Revamping dict.keys(), .values() and .items()
PEP written by Guido van Rossum.
Backported to 2.7 by Alexandre Vassalotti; :issue:1967.
The :class:memoryview object provides a view of another object's
memory content that matches the :class:bytes type's interface.
.. doctest:: :options: +SKIP
>>> import string
>>> m = memoryview(string.letters)
>>> m
<memory at 0x37f850>
>>> len(m) # Returns length of underlying object
52
>>> m[0], m[25], m[26] # Indexing returns one byte
('a', 'z', 'A')
>>> m2 = m[0:26] # Slicing returns another memoryview
>>> m2
<memory at 0x37f080>
The content of the view can be converted to a string of bytes or a list of integers:
.. doctest:: :options: +SKIP
>>> m2.tobytes()
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
>>> m2.tolist()
[97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, ... 121, 122]
>>>
:class:memoryview objects allow modifying the underlying object if
it's a mutable object.
.. doctest:: :options: +SKIP
>>> m2[0] = 75
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: cannot modify read-only memory
>>> b = bytearray(string.letters) # Creating a mutable object
>>> b
bytearray(b'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ')
>>> mb = memoryview(b)
>>> mb[0] = '*' # Assign to view, changing the bytearray.
>>> b[0:5] # The bytearray has been changed.
bytearray(b'*bcde')
>>>
.. seealso::
:pep:3137 - Immutable Bytes and Mutable Buffer
PEP written by Guido van Rossum.
Implemented by Travis Oliphant, Antoine Pitrou and others.
Backported to 2.7 by Antoine Pitrou; :issue:2396.
Some smaller changes made to the core Python language are:
The syntax for set literals has been backported from Python 3.x.
Curly brackets are used to surround the contents of the resulting
mutable set; set literals are
distinguished from dictionaries by not containing colons and values.
{} continues to represent an empty dictionary; use
set() for an empty set.
.. doctest:: :options: +SKIP
{1, 2, 3, 4, 5} set([1, 2, 3, 4, 5]) set() # empty set set([]) {} # empty dict {}
Backported by Alexandre Vassalotti; :issue:2335.
Dictionary and set comprehensions are another feature backported from 3.x, generalizing list/generator comprehensions to use the literal syntax for sets and dictionaries.
.. doctest:: :options: +SKIP
{x: x*x for x in range(6)} {0: 0, 1: 1, 2: 4, 3: 9, 4: 16, 5: 25} {('a'*x) for x in range(6)} set(['', 'a', 'aa', 'aaa', 'aaaa', 'aaaaa'])
Backported by Alexandre Vassalotti; :issue:2333.
The :keyword:with statement can now use multiple context managers
in one statement. Context managers are processed from left to right
and each one is treated as beginning a new :keyword:!with statement.
This means that::
with A() as a, B() as b: ... suite of statements ...
is equivalent to::
with A() as a: with B() as b: ... suite of statements ...
The :func:contextlib.nested function provides a very similar
function, so it's no longer necessary and has been deprecated.
(Proposed in https://codereview.appspot.com/53094; implemented by Georg Brandl.)
Conversions between floating-point numbers and strings are
now correctly rounded on most platforms. These conversions occur
in many different places: :func:str on
floats and complex numbers; the :class:float and :class:complex
constructors;
numeric formatting; serializing and
deserializing floats and complex numbers using the
:mod:marshal, :mod:pickle
and :mod:json modules;
parsing of float and imaginary literals in Python code;
and :class:~decimal.Decimal-to-float conversion.
Related to this, the :func:repr of a floating-point number x
now returns a result based on the shortest decimal string that's
guaranteed to round back to x under correct rounding (with
round-half-to-even rounding mode). Previously it gave a string
based on rounding x to 17 decimal digits.
.. maybe add an example?
The rounding library responsible for this improvement works on
Windows and on Unix platforms using the gcc, icc, or suncc
compilers. There may be a small number of platforms where correct
operation of this code cannot be guaranteed, so the code is not
used on such systems. You can find out which code is being used
by checking :data:sys.float_repr_style, which will be short
if the new code is in use and legacy if it isn't.
Implemented by Eric Smith and Mark Dickinson, using David Gay's
:file:dtoa.c library; :issue:7117.
Conversions from long integers and regular integers to floating point now round differently, returning the floating-point number closest to the number. This doesn't matter for small integers that can be converted exactly, but for large numbers that will unavoidably lose precision, Python 2.7 now approximates more closely. For example, Python 2.6 computed the following::
n = 295147905179352891391 float(n) 2.9514790517935283e+20 n - long(float(n)) 65535L
Python 2.7's floating-point result is larger, but much closer to the true value::
n = 295147905179352891391 float(n) 2.9514790517935289e+20 n - long(float(n)) -1L
(Implemented by Mark Dickinson; :issue:3166.)
Integer division is also more accurate in its rounding behaviours. (Also
implemented by Mark Dickinson; :issue:1811.)
Implicit coercion for complex numbers has been removed; the interpreter
will no longer ever attempt to call a :meth:__coerce__ method on complex
objects. (Removed by Meador Inge and Mark Dickinson; :issue:5211.)
The :meth:str.format method now supports automatic numbering of the replacement
fields. This makes using :meth:str.format more closely resemble using
%s formatting::
'{}:{}:{}'.format(2009, 04, 'Sunday') '2009:4:Sunday' '{}:{}:{day}'.format(2009, 4, day='Sunday') '2009:4:Sunday'
The auto-numbering takes the fields from left to right, so the first {...}
specifier will use the first argument to :meth:str.format, the next
specifier will use the next argument, and so on. You can't mix auto-numbering
and explicit numbering -- either number all of your specifier fields or none
of them -- but you can mix auto-numbering and named fields, as in the second
example above. (Contributed by Eric Smith; :issue:5237.)
Complex numbers now correctly support usage with :func:format,
and default to being right-aligned.
Specifying a precision or comma-separation applies to both the real
and imaginary parts of the number, but a specified field width and
alignment is applied to the whole of the resulting 1.5+3j
output. (Contributed by Eric Smith; :issue:1588 and :issue:7988.)
The 'F' format code now always formats its output using uppercase characters,
so it will now produce 'INF' and 'NAN'.
(Contributed by Eric Smith; :issue:3382.)
A low-level change: the :meth:object.__format__ method now triggers
a :exc:PendingDeprecationWarning if it's passed a format string,
because the :meth:__format__ method for :class:object converts
the object to a string representation and formats that. Previously
the method silently applied the format string to the string
representation, but that could hide mistakes in Python code. If
you're supplying formatting information such as an alignment or
precision, presumably you're expecting the formatting to be applied
in some object-specific way. (Fixed by Eric Smith; :issue:7994.)
The :func:int and :func:long types gained a bit_length
method that returns the number of bits necessary to represent
its argument in binary::
>>> n = 37
>>> bin(n)
'0b100101'
>>> n.bit_length()
6
>>> n = 2**123-1
>>> n.bit_length()
123
>>> (n+1).bit_length()
124
(Contributed by Fredrik Johansson and Victor Stinner; :issue:3439.)
The :keyword:import statement will no longer try an absolute import
if a relative import (e.g. from .os import sep) fails. This
fixes a bug, but could possibly break certain :keyword:!import
statements that were only working by accident. (Fixed by Meador Inge;
:issue:7902.)
It's now possible for a subclass of the built-in :class:unicode type
to override the :meth:__unicode__ method. (Implemented by
Victor Stinner; :issue:1583863.)
The :class:bytearray type's :meth:~bytearray.translate method now accepts
None as its first argument. (Fixed by Georg Brandl;
:issue:4759.)
.. XXX bytearray doesn't seem to be documented
When using @classmethod and @staticmethod to wrap
methods as class or static methods, the wrapper object now
exposes the wrapped function as their :attr:__func__ attribute.
(Contributed by Amaury Forgeot d'Arc, after a suggestion by
George Sakkis; :issue:5982.)
When a restricted set of attributes were set using __slots__,
deleting an unset attribute would not raise :exc:AttributeError
as you would expect. Fixed by Benjamin Peterson; :issue:7604.)
Two new encodings are now supported: "cp720", used primarily for
Arabic text; and "cp858", a variant of CP 850 that adds the euro
symbol. (CP720 contributed by Alexander Belchenko and Amaury
Forgeot d'Arc in :issue:1616979; CP858 contributed by Tim Hatch in
:issue:8016.)
The :class:file object will now set the :attr:filename attribute
on the :exc:IOError exception when trying to open a directory
on POSIX platforms (noted by Jan Kaliszewski; :issue:4764), and
now explicitly checks for and forbids writing to read-only file objects
instead of trusting the C library to catch and report the error
(fixed by Stefan Krah; :issue:5677).
The Python tokenizer now translates line endings itself, so the
:func:compile built-in function now accepts code using any
line-ending convention. Additionally, it no longer requires that the
code end in a newline.
Extra parentheses in function definitions are illegal in Python 3.x,
meaning that you get a syntax error from def f((x)): pass. In
Python3-warning mode, Python 2.7 will now warn about this odd usage.
(Noted by James Lingard; :issue:7362.)
It's now possible to create weak references to old-style class
objects. New-style classes were always weak-referenceable. (Fixed
by Antoine Pitrou; :issue:8268.)
When a module object is garbage-collected, the module's dictionary is
now only cleared if no one else is holding a reference to the
dictionary (:issue:7140).
.. ======================================================================
.. _new-27-interpreter:
A new environment variable, :envvar:PYTHONWARNINGS,
allows controlling warnings. It should be set to a string
containing warning settings, equivalent to those
used with the :option:-W switch, separated by commas.
(Contributed by Brian Curtin; :issue:7301.)
For example, the following setting will print warnings every time
they occur, but turn warnings from the :mod:Cookie module into an
error. (The exact syntax for setting an environment variable varies
across operating systems and shells.)
::
export PYTHONWARNINGS=all,error:::Cookie:0
.. ======================================================================
Several performance enhancements have been added:
A new opcode was added to perform the initial setup for
:keyword:with statements, looking up the :meth:__enter__ and
:meth:__exit__ methods. (Contributed by Benjamin Peterson.)
The garbage collector now performs better for one common usage
pattern: when many objects are being allocated without deallocating
any of them. This would previously take quadratic
time for garbage collection, but now the number of full garbage collections
is reduced as the number of objects on the heap grows.
The new logic only performs a full garbage collection pass when
the middle generation has been collected 10 times and when the
number of survivor objects from the middle generation exceeds 10% of
the number of objects in the oldest generation. (Suggested by Martin
von Löwis and implemented by Antoine Pitrou; :issue:4074.)
The garbage collector tries to avoid tracking simple containers
which can't be part of a cycle. In Python 2.7, this is now true for
tuples and dicts containing atomic types (such as ints, strings,
etc.). Transitively, a dict containing tuples of atomic types won't
be tracked either. This helps reduce the cost of each
garbage collection by decreasing the number of objects to be
considered and traversed by the collector.
(Contributed by Antoine Pitrou; :issue:4688.)
Long integers are now stored internally either in base 215 or in base
230, the base being determined at build time. Previously, they
were always stored in base 215. Using base 230 gives
significant performance improvements on 64-bit machines, but
benchmark results on 32-bit machines have been mixed. Therefore,
the default is to use base 230 on 64-bit machines and base 215
on 32-bit machines; on Unix, there's a new configure option
:option:!--enable-big-digits that can be used to override this default.
Apart from the performance improvements this change should be
invisible to end users, with one exception: for testing and
debugging purposes there's a new structseq :data:sys.long_info that
provides information about the internal format, giving the number of
bits per digit and the size in bytes of the C type used to store
each digit::
import sys sys.long_info sys.long_info(bits_per_digit=30, sizeof_digit=4)
(Contributed by Mark Dickinson; :issue:4258.)
Another set of changes made long objects a few bytes smaller: 2 bytes
smaller on 32-bit systems and 6 bytes on 64-bit.
(Contributed by Mark Dickinson; :issue:5260.)
The division algorithm for long integers has been made faster
by tightening the inner loop, doing shifts instead of multiplications,
and fixing an unnecessary extra iteration.
Various benchmarks show speedups of between 50% and 150% for long
integer divisions and modulo operations.
(Contributed by Mark Dickinson; :issue:5512.)
Bitwise operations are also significantly faster (initial patch by
Gregory Smith; :issue:1087418).
The implementation of % checks for the left-side operand being
a Python string and special-cases it; this results in a 1--3%
performance increase for applications that frequently use %
with strings, such as templating libraries.
(Implemented by Collin Winter; :issue:5176.)
List comprehensions with an if condition are compiled into
faster bytecode. (Patch by Antoine Pitrou, back-ported to 2.7
by Jeffrey Yasskin; :issue:4715.)
Converting an integer or long integer to a decimal string was made
faster by special-casing base 10 instead of using a generalized
conversion function that supports arbitrary bases.
(Patch by Gawain Bolton; :issue:6713.)
The :meth:split, :meth:replace, :meth:rindex,
:meth:rpartition, and :meth:rsplit methods of string-like types
(strings, Unicode strings, and :class:bytearray objects) now use a
fast reverse-search algorithm instead of a character-by-character
scan. This is sometimes faster by a factor of 10. (Added by
Florent Xicluna; :issue:7462 and :issue:7622.)
The :mod:pickle and :mod:cPickle modules now automatically
intern the strings used for attribute names, reducing memory usage
of the objects resulting from unpickling. (Contributed by Jake
McGuire; :issue:5084.)
The :mod:cPickle module now special-cases dictionaries,
nearly halving the time required to pickle them.
(Contributed by Collin Winter; :issue:5670.)
.. ======================================================================
As in every release, Python's standard library received a number of
enhancements and bug fixes. Here's a partial list of the most notable
changes, sorted alphabetically by module name. Consult the
:file:Misc/NEWS file in the source tree for a more complete list of
changes, or look through the Subversion logs for all the details.
The :mod:bdb module's base debugging class :class:~bdb.Bdb
gained a feature for skipping modules. The constructor
now takes an iterable containing glob-style patterns such as
django.*; the debugger will not step into stack frames
from a module that matches one of these patterns.
(Contributed by Maru Newby after a suggestion by
Senthil Kumaran; :issue:5142.)
The :mod:binascii module now supports the buffer API, so it can be
used with :class:memoryview instances and other similar buffer objects.
(Backported from 3.x by Florent Xicluna; :issue:7703.)
Updated module: the :mod:bsddb module has been updated from 4.7.2devel9
to version 4.8.4 of
the pybsddb package <https://www.jcea.es/programacion/pybsddb.htm>__.
The new version features better Python 3.x compatibility, various bug fixes,
and adds several new BerkeleyDB flags and methods.
(Updated by Jesús Cea Avión; :issue:8156. The pybsddb
changelog can be read at http://hg.jcea.es/pybsddb/file/tip/ChangeLog.)
The :mod:bz2 module's :class:~bz2.BZ2File now supports the context
management protocol, so you can write with bz2.BZ2File(...) as f:.
(Contributed by Hagen Fürstenau; :issue:3860.)
New class: the :class:~collections.Counter class in the :mod:collections
module is useful for tallying data. :class:~collections.Counter instances
behave mostly like dictionaries but return zero for missing keys instead of
raising a :exc:KeyError:
.. doctest:: :options: +NORMALIZE_WHITESPACE
from collections import Counter c = Counter() for letter in 'here is a sample of english text': ... c[letter] += 1 ... c # doctest: +SKIP Counter({' ': 6, 'e': 5, 's': 3, 'a': 2, 'i': 2, 'h': 2, 'l': 2, 't': 2, 'g': 1, 'f': 1, 'm': 1, 'o': 1, 'n': 1, 'p': 1, 'r': 1, 'x': 1}) c['e'] 5 c['z'] 0
There are three additional :class:~collections.Counter methods.
:meth:~collections.Counter.most_common returns the N most common
elements and their counts. :meth:~collections.Counter.elements
returns an iterator over the contained elements, repeating each
element as many times as its count.
:meth:~collections.Counter.subtract takes an iterable and
subtracts one for each element instead of adding; if the argument is
a dictionary or another :class:Counter, the counts are
subtracted. ::
c.most_common(5) [(' ', 6), ('e', 5), ('s', 3), ('a', 2), ('i', 2)] c.elements() -> 'a', 'a', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', 'e', 'e', 'e', 'e', 'e', 'g', 'f', 'i', 'i', 'h', 'h', 'm', 'l', 'l', 'o', 'n', 'p', 's', 's', 's', 'r', 't', 't', 'x' c['e'] 5 c.subtract('very heavy on the letter e') c['e'] # Count is now lower -1
Contributed by Raymond Hettinger; :issue:1696199.
.. revision 79660
New class: :class:~collections.OrderedDict is described in the earlier
section :ref:pep-0372.
New method: The :class:~collections.deque data type now has a
:meth:~collections.deque.count method that returns the number of
contained elements equal to the supplied argument x, and a
:meth:~collections.deque.reverse method that reverses the elements
of the deque in-place. :class:~collections.deque also exposes its maximum
length as the read-only :attr:~collections.deque.maxlen attribute.
(Both features added by Raymond Hettinger.)
The :class:~collections.namedtuple class now has an optional rename parameter.
If rename is true, field names that are invalid because they've
been repeated or aren't legal Python identifiers will be
renamed to legal names that are derived from the field's
position within the list of fields:
from collections import namedtuple T = namedtuple('T', ['field1', '$illegal', 'for', 'field2'], rename=True) T._fields ('field1', '_1', '_2', 'field2')
(Added by Raymond Hettinger; :issue:1818.)
Finally, the :class:~collections.Mapping abstract base class now
returns :const:NotImplemented if a mapping is compared to
another type that isn't a :class:Mapping.
(Fixed by Daniel Stutzbach; :issue:8729.)
Constructors for the parsing classes in the :mod:ConfigParser module now
take an allow_no_value parameter, defaulting to false; if true,
options without values will be allowed. For example::
import ConfigParser, StringIO sample_config = """ ... [mysqld] ... user = mysql ... pid-file = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid ... skip-bdb ... """ config = ConfigParser.RawConfigParser(allow_no_value=True) config.readfp(StringIO.StringIO(sample_config)) config.get('mysqld', 'user') 'mysql' print config.get('mysqld', 'skip-bdb') None print config.get('mysqld', 'unknown') Traceback (most recent call last): ... NoOptionError: No option 'unknown' in section: 'mysqld'
(Contributed by Mats Kindahl; :issue:7005.)
Deprecated function: :func:contextlib.nested, which allows
handling more than one context manager with a single :keyword:with
statement, has been deprecated, because the :keyword:!with statement
now supports multiple context managers.
The :mod:cookielib module now ignores cookies that have an invalid
version field, one that doesn't contain an integer value. (Fixed by
John J. Lee; :issue:3924.)
The :mod:copy module's :func:~copy.deepcopy function will now
correctly copy bound instance methods. (Implemented by
Robert Collins; :issue:1515.)
The :mod:ctypes module now always converts None to a C NULL
pointer for arguments declared as pointers. (Changed by Thomas
Heller; :issue:4606.) The underlying libffi library <https://sourceware.org/libffi/>__ has been updated to version
3.0.9, containing various fixes for different platforms. (Updated
by Matthias Klose; :issue:8142.)
New method: the :mod:datetime module's :class:~datetime.timedelta class
gained a :meth:~datetime.timedelta.total_seconds method that returns the
number of seconds in the duration. (Contributed by Brian Quinlan; :issue:5788.)
New method: the :class:~decimal.Decimal class gained a
:meth:~decimal.Decimal.from_float class method that performs an exact
conversion of a floating-point number to a :class:~decimal.Decimal.
This exact conversion strives for the
closest decimal approximation to the floating-point representation's value;
the resulting decimal value will therefore still include the inaccuracy,
if any.
For example, Decimal.from_float(0.1) returns
Decimal('0.1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625').
(Implemented by Raymond Hettinger; :issue:4796.)
Comparing instances of :class:~decimal.Decimal with floating-point
numbers now produces sensible results based on the numeric values
of the operands. Previously such comparisons would fall back to
Python's default rules for comparing objects, which produced arbitrary
results based on their type. Note that you still cannot combine
:class:Decimal and floating-point in other operations such as addition,
since you should be explicitly choosing how to convert between float and
:class:~decimal.Decimal. (Fixed by Mark Dickinson; :issue:2531.)
The constructor for :class:~decimal.Decimal now accepts
floating-point numbers (added by Raymond Hettinger; :issue:8257)
and non-European Unicode characters such as Arabic-Indic digits
(contributed by Mark Dickinson; :issue:6595).
Most of the methods of the :class:~decimal.Context class now accept integers
as well as :class:~decimal.Decimal instances; the only exceptions are the
:meth:~decimal.Context.canonical and :meth:~decimal.Context.is_canonical
methods. (Patch by Juan José Conti; :issue:7633.)
When using :class:~decimal.Decimal instances with a string's
:meth:~str.format method, the default alignment was previously
left-alignment. This has been changed to right-alignment, which is
more sensible for numeric types. (Changed by Mark Dickinson; :issue:6857.)
Comparisons involving a signaling NaN value (or sNAN) now signal
:const:InvalidOperation instead of silently returning a true or
false value depending on the comparison operator. Quiet NaN values
(or NaN) are now hashable. (Fixed by Mark Dickinson;
:issue:7279.)
The :mod:difflib module now produces output that is more
compatible with modern :command:diff/:command:patch tools
through one small change, using a tab character instead of spaces as
a separator in the header giving the filename. (Fixed by Anatoly
Techtonik; :issue:7585.)
The Distutils sdist command now always regenerates the
:file:MANIFEST file, since even if the :file:MANIFEST.in or
:file:setup.py files haven't been modified, the user might have
created some new files that should be included.
(Fixed by Tarek Ziadé; :issue:8688.)
The :mod:doctest module's :const:IGNORE_EXCEPTION_DETAIL flag
will now ignore the name of the module containing the exception
being tested. (Patch by Lennart Regebro; :issue:7490.)
The :mod:email module's :class:~email.message.Message class will
now accept a Unicode-valued payload, automatically converting the
payload to the encoding specified by :attr:output_charset.
(Added by R. David Murray; :issue:1368247.)
The :class:~fractions.Fraction class now accepts a single float or
:class:~decimal.Decimal instance, or two rational numbers, as
arguments to its constructor. (Implemented by Mark Dickinson;
rationals added in :issue:5812, and float/decimal in
:issue:8294.)
Ordering comparisons (<, <=, >, >=) between
fractions and complex numbers now raise a :exc:TypeError.
This fixes an oversight, making the :class:~fractions.Fraction
match the other numeric types.
.. revision 79455
New class: :class:~ftplib.FTP_TLS in
the :mod:ftplib module provides secure FTP
connections using TLS encapsulation of authentication as well as
subsequent control and data transfers.
(Contributed by Giampaolo Rodola; :issue:2054.)
The :meth:~ftplib.FTP.storbinary method for binary uploads can now restart
uploads thanks to an added rest parameter (patch by Pablo Mouzo;
:issue:6845.)
New class decorator: :func:~functools.total_ordering in the :mod:functools
module takes a class that defines an :meth:__eq__ method and one of
:meth:__lt__, :meth:__le__, :meth:__gt__, or :meth:__ge__,
and generates the missing comparison methods. Since the
:meth:__cmp__ method is being deprecated in Python 3.x,
this decorator makes it easier to define ordered classes.
(Added by Raymond Hettinger; :issue:5479.)
New function: :func:~functools.cmp_to_key will take an old-style comparison
function that expects two arguments and return a new callable that
can be used as the key parameter to functions such as
:func:sorted, :func:min and :func:max, etc. The primary
intended use is to help with making code compatible with Python 3.x.
(Added by Raymond Hettinger.)
New function: the :mod:gc module's :func:~gc.is_tracked returns
true if a given instance is tracked by the garbage collector, false
otherwise. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou; :issue:4688.)
The :mod:gzip module's :class:~gzip.GzipFile now supports the context
management protocol, so you can write with gzip.GzipFile(...) as f:
(contributed by Hagen Fürstenau; :issue:3860), and it now implements
the :class:io.BufferedIOBase ABC, so you can wrap it with
:class:io.BufferedReader for faster processing
(contributed by Nir Aides; :issue:7471).
It's also now possible to override the modification time
recorded in a gzipped file by providing an optional timestamp to
the constructor. (Contributed by Jacques Frechet; :issue:4272.)
Files in gzip format can be padded with trailing zero bytes; the
:mod:gzip module will now consume these trailing bytes. (Fixed by
Tadek Pietraszek and Brian Curtin; :issue:2846.)
New attribute: the :mod:hashlib module now has an :attr:~hashlib.hashlib.algorithms
attribute containing a tuple naming the supported algorithms.
In Python 2.7, hashlib.algorithms contains
('md5', 'sha1', 'sha224', 'sha256', 'sha384', 'sha512').
(Contributed by Carl Chenet; :issue:7418.)
The default :class:~httplib.HTTPResponse class used by the :mod:httplib module now
supports buffering, resulting in much faster reading of HTTP responses.
(Contributed by Kristján Valur Jónsson; :issue:4879.)
The :class:~httplib.HTTPConnection and :class:~httplib.HTTPSConnection classes
now support a source_address parameter, a (host, port) 2-tuple
giving the source address that will be used for the connection.
(Contributed by Eldon Ziegler; :issue:3972.)
The :mod:ihooks module now supports relative imports. Note that
:mod:ihooks is an older module for customizing imports,
superseded by the :mod:imputil module added in Python 2.0.
(Relative import support added by Neil Schemenauer.)
.. revision 75423
The :mod:imaplib module now supports IPv6 addresses.
(Contributed by Derek Morr; :issue:1655.)
New function: the :mod:inspect module's :func:~inspect.getcallargs
takes a callable and its positional and keyword arguments,
and figures out which of the callable's parameters will receive each argument,
returning a dictionary mapping argument names to their values. For example::
from inspect import getcallargs def f(a, b=1, *pos, **named): ... pass getcallargs(f, 1, 2, 3) {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'pos': (3,), 'named': {}} getcallargs(f, a=2, x=4) {'a': 2, 'b': 1, 'pos': (), 'named': {'x': 4}} getcallargs(f) Traceback (most recent call last): ... TypeError: f() takes at least 1 argument (0 given)
Contributed by George Sakkis; :issue:3135.
Updated module: The :mod:io library has been upgraded to the version shipped with
Python 3.1. For 3.1, the I/O library was entirely rewritten in C
and is 2 to 20 times faster depending on the task being performed. The
original Python version was renamed to the :mod:_pyio module.
One minor resulting change: the :class:io.TextIOBase class now
has an :attr:errors attribute giving the error setting
used for encoding and decoding errors (one of 'strict', 'replace',
'ignore').
The :class:io.FileIO class now raises an :exc:OSError when passed
an invalid file descriptor. (Implemented by Benjamin Peterson;
:issue:4991.) The :meth:~io.IOBase.truncate method now preserves the
file position; previously it would change the file position to the
end of the new file. (Fixed by Pascal Chambon; :issue:6939.)
New function: itertools.compress(data, selectors) takes two
iterators. Elements of data are returned if the corresponding
value in selectors is true::
itertools.compress('ABCDEF', [1,0,1,0,1,1]) => A, C, E, F
.. maybe here is better to use >>> list(itertools.compress(...)) instead
New function: itertools.combinations_with_replacement(iter, r)
returns all the possible r-length combinations of elements from the
iterable iter. Unlike :func:~itertools.combinations, individual elements
can be repeated in the generated combinations::
itertools.combinations_with_replacement('abc', 2) => ('a', 'a'), ('a', 'b'), ('a', 'c'), ('b', 'b'), ('b', 'c'), ('c', 'c')
Note that elements are treated as unique depending on their position in the input, not their actual values.
The :func:itertools.count function now has a step argument that
allows incrementing by values other than 1. :func:~itertools.count also
now allows keyword arguments, and using non-integer values such as
floats or :class:~decimal.Decimal instances. (Implemented by Raymond
Hettinger; :issue:5032.)
:func:itertools.combinations and :func:itertools.product
previously raised :exc:ValueError for values of r larger than
the input iterable. This was deemed a specification error, so they
now return an empty iterator. (Fixed by Raymond Hettinger; :issue:4816.)
Updated module: The :mod:json module was upgraded to version 2.0.9 of the
simplejson package, which includes a C extension that makes
encoding and decoding faster.
(Contributed by Bob Ippolito; :issue:4136.)
To support the new :class:collections.OrderedDict type, :func:json.load
now has an optional object_pairs_hook parameter that will be called
with any object literal that decodes to a list of pairs.
(Contributed by Raymond Hettinger; :issue:5381.)
The :mod:mailbox module's :class:~mailbox.Maildir class now records the
timestamp on the directories it reads, and only re-reads them if the
modification time has subsequently changed. This improves
performance by avoiding unneeded directory scans. (Fixed by
A.M. Kuchling and Antoine Pitrou; :issue:1607951, :issue:6896.)
New functions: the :mod:math module gained
:func:~math.erf and :func:~math.erfc for the error function and the complementary error function,
:func:~math.expm1 which computes e**x - 1 with more precision than
using :func:~math.exp and subtracting 1,
:func:~math.gamma for the Gamma function, and
:func:~math.lgamma for the natural log of the Gamma function.
(Contributed by Mark Dickinson and nirinA raseliarison; :issue:3366.)
The :mod:multiprocessing module's :class:Manager* classes
can now be passed a callable that will be called whenever
a subprocess is started, along with a set of arguments that will be
passed to the callable.
(Contributed by lekma; :issue:5585.)
The :class:~multiprocessing.Pool class, which controls a pool of worker processes,
now has an optional maxtasksperchild parameter. Worker processes
will perform the specified number of tasks and then exit, causing the
:class:~multiprocessing.Pool to start a new worker. This is useful if tasks may leak
memory or other resources, or if some tasks will cause the worker to
become very large.
(Contributed by Charles Cazabon; :issue:6963.)
The :mod:nntplib module now supports IPv6 addresses.
(Contributed by Derek Morr; :issue:1664.)
New functions: the :mod:os module wraps the following POSIX system
calls: :func:~os.getresgid and :func:~os.getresuid, which return the
real, effective, and saved GIDs and UIDs;
:func:~os.setresgid and :func:~os.setresuid, which set
real, effective, and saved GIDs and UIDs to new values;
:func:~os.initgroups, which initialize the group access list
for the current process. (GID/UID functions
contributed by Travis H.; :issue:6508. Support for initgroups added
by Jean-Paul Calderone; :issue:7333.)
The :func:os.fork function now re-initializes the import lock in
the child process; this fixes problems on Solaris when :func:~os.fork
is called from a thread. (Fixed by Zsolt Cserna; :issue:7242.)
In the :mod:os.path module, the :func:~os.path.normpath and
:func:~os.path.abspath functions now preserve Unicode; if their input path
is a Unicode string, the return value is also a Unicode string.
(:meth:~os.path.normpath fixed by Matt Giuca in :issue:5827;
:meth:~os.path.abspath fixed by Ezio Melotti in :issue:3426.)
The :mod:pydoc module now has help for the various symbols that Python
uses. You can now do help('<<') or help('@'), for example.
(Contributed by David Laban; :issue:4739.)
The :mod:re module's :func:~re.split, :func:~re.sub, and :func:~re.subn
now accept an optional flags argument, for consistency with the
other functions in the module. (Added by Gregory P. Smith.)
New function: :func:~runpy.run_path in the :mod:runpy module
will execute the code at a provided path argument. path can be
the path of a Python source file (:file:example.py), a compiled
bytecode file (:file:example.pyc), a directory
(:file:./package/), or a zip archive (:file:example.zip). If a
directory or zip path is provided, it will be added to the front of
sys.path and the module :mod:__main__ will be imported. It's
expected that the directory or zip contains a :file:__main__.py;
if it doesn't, some other :file:__main__.py might be imported from
a location later in sys.path. This makes more of the machinery
of :mod:runpy available to scripts that want to mimic the way
Python's command line processes an explicit path name.
(Added by Nick Coghlan; :issue:6816.)
New function: in the :mod:shutil module, :func:~shutil.make_archive
takes a filename, archive type (zip or tar-format), and a directory
path, and creates an archive containing the directory's contents.
(Added by Tarek Ziadé.)
:mod:shutil's :func:~shutil.copyfile and :func:~shutil.copytree
functions now raise a :exc:~shutil.SpecialFileError exception when
asked to copy a named pipe. Previously the code would treat
named pipes like a regular file by opening them for reading, and
this would block indefinitely. (Fixed by Antoine Pitrou; :issue:3002.)
The :mod:signal module no longer re-installs the signal handler
unless this is truly necessary, which fixes a bug that could make it
impossible to catch the EINTR signal robustly. (Fixed by
Charles-Francois Natali; :issue:8354.)
New functions: in the :mod:site module, three new functions
return various site- and user-specific paths.
:func:~site.getsitepackages returns a list containing all
global site-packages directories,
:func:~site.getusersitepackages returns the path of the user's
site-packages directory, and
:func:~site.getuserbase returns the value of the :envvar:USER_BASE
environment variable, giving the path to a directory that can be used
to store data.
(Contributed by Tarek Ziadé; :issue:6693.)
The :mod:site module now reports exceptions occurring
when the :mod:sitecustomize module is imported, and will no longer
catch and swallow the :exc:KeyboardInterrupt exception. (Fixed by
Victor Stinner; :issue:3137.)
The :func:~socket.create_connection function
gained a source_address parameter, a (host, port) 2-tuple
giving the source address that will be used for the connection.
(Contributed by Eldon Ziegler; :issue:3972.)
The :meth:~socket.socket.recv_into and :meth:~socket.socket.recvfrom_into
methods will now write into objects that support the buffer API, most usefully
the :class:bytearray and :class:memoryview objects. (Implemented by
Antoine Pitrou; :issue:8104.)
The :mod:SocketServer module's :class:~SocketServer.TCPServer class now
supports socket timeouts and disabling the Nagle algorithm.
The :attr:~SocketServer.TCPServer.disable_nagle_algorithm class attribute
defaults to False; if overridden to be true,
new request connections will have the TCP_NODELAY option set to
prevent buffering many small sends into a single TCP packet.
The :attr:~SocketServer.BaseServer.timeout class attribute can hold
a timeout in seconds that will be applied to the request socket; if
no request is received within that time, :meth:~SocketServer.BaseServer.handle_timeout
will be called and :meth:~SocketServer.BaseServer.handle_request will return.
(Contributed by Kristján Valur Jónsson; :issue:6192 and :issue:6267.)
Updated module: the :mod:sqlite3 module has been updated to
version 2.6.0 of the pysqlite package <https://github.com/ghaering/pysqlite>__. Version 2.6.0 includes a number of bugfixes, and adds
the ability to load SQLite extensions from shared libraries.
Call the enable_load_extension(True) method to enable extensions,
and then call :meth:~sqlite3.Connection.load_extension to load a particular shared library.
(Updated by Gerhard Häring.)
The :mod:ssl module's :class:~ssl.SSLSocket objects now support the
buffer API, which fixed a test suite failure (fix by Antoine Pitrou;
:issue:7133) and automatically set
OpenSSL's :c:macro:SSL_MODE_AUTO_RETRY, which will prevent an error
code being returned from :meth:recv operations that trigger an SSL
renegotiation (fix by Antoine Pitrou; :issue:8222).
The :func:ssl.wrap_socket constructor function now takes a
ciphers argument that's a string listing the encryption algorithms
to be allowed; the format of the string is described
in the OpenSSL documentation <https://www.openssl.org/docs/manmaster/man1/ciphers.html#CIPHER-LIST-FORMAT>__.
(Added by Antoine Pitrou; :issue:8322.)
Another change makes the extension load all of OpenSSL's ciphers and
digest algorithms so that they're all available. Some SSL
certificates couldn't be verified, reporting an "unknown algorithm"
error. (Reported by Beda Kosata, and fixed by Antoine Pitrou;
:issue:8484.)
The version of OpenSSL being used is now available as the module
attributes :data:ssl.OPENSSL_VERSION (a string),
:data:ssl.OPENSSL_VERSION_INFO (a 5-tuple), and
:data:ssl.OPENSSL_VERSION_NUMBER (an integer). (Added by Antoine
Pitrou; :issue:8321.)
The :mod:struct module will no longer silently ignore overflow
errors when a value is too large for a particular integer format
code (one of bBhHiIlLqQ); it now always raises a
:exc:struct.error exception. (Changed by Mark Dickinson;
:issue:1523.) The :func:~struct.pack function will also
attempt to use :meth:__index__ to convert and pack non-integers
before trying the :meth:__int__ method or reporting an error.
(Changed by Mark Dickinson; :issue:8300.)
New function: the :mod:subprocess module's
:func:~subprocess.check_output runs a command with a specified set of arguments
and returns the command's output as a string when the command runs without
error, or raises a :exc:~subprocess.CalledProcessError exception otherwise.
::
subprocess.check_output(['df', '-h', '.']) 'Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on\n /dev/disk0s2 52G 49G 3.0G 94% /\n'
subprocess.check_output(['df', '-h', '/bogus']) ... subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['df', '-h', '/bogus']' returned non-zero exit status 1
(Contributed by Gregory P. Smith.)
The :mod:subprocess module will now retry its internal system calls
on receiving an :const:EINTR signal. (Reported by several people; final
patch by Gregory P. Smith in :issue:1068268.)
New function: :func:~symtable.Symbol.is_declared_global in the :mod:symtable module
returns true for variables that are explicitly declared to be global,
false for ones that are implicitly global.
(Contributed by Jeremy Hylton.)
The :mod:syslog module will now use the value of sys.argv[0] as the
identifier instead of the previous default value of 'python'.
(Changed by Sean Reifschneider; :issue:8451.)
The sys.version_info value is now a named tuple, with attributes
named :attr:major, :attr:minor, :attr:micro,
:attr:releaselevel, and :attr:serial. (Contributed by Ross
Light; :issue:4285.)
:func:sys.getwindowsversion also returns a named tuple,
with attributes named :attr:major, :attr:minor, :attr:build,
:attr:platform, :attr:service_pack, :attr:service_pack_major,
:attr:service_pack_minor, :attr:suite_mask, and
:attr:product_type. (Contributed by Brian Curtin; :issue:7766.)
The :mod:tarfile module's default error handling has changed, to
no longer suppress fatal errors. The default error level was previously 0,
which meant that errors would only result in a message being written to the
debug log, but because the debug log is not activated by default,
these errors go unnoticed. The default error level is now 1,
which raises an exception if there's an error.
(Changed by Lars Gustäbel; :issue:7357.)
:mod:tarfile now supports filtering the :class:~tarfile.TarInfo
objects being added to a tar file. When you call :meth:~tarfile.TarFile.add,
you may supply an optional filter argument
that's a callable. The filter callable will be passed the
:class:~tarfile.TarInfo for every file being added, and can modify and return it.
If the callable returns None, the file will be excluded from the
resulting archive. This is more powerful than the existing
exclude argument, which has therefore been deprecated.
(Added by Lars Gustäbel; :issue:6856.)
The :class:~tarfile.TarFile class also now supports the context management protocol.
(Added by Lars Gustäbel; :issue:7232.)
The :meth:~threading.Event.wait method of the :class:threading.Event class
now returns the internal flag on exit. This means the method will usually
return true because :meth:~threading.Event.wait is supposed to block until the
internal flag becomes true. The return value will only be false if
a timeout was provided and the operation timed out.
(Contributed by Tim Lesher; :issue:1674032.)
The Unicode database provided by the :mod:unicodedata module is
now used internally to determine which characters are numeric,
whitespace, or represent line breaks. The database also
includes information from the :file:Unihan.txt data file (patch
by Anders Chrigström and Amaury Forgeot d'Arc; :issue:1571184)
and has been updated to version 5.2.0 (updated by
Florent Xicluna; :issue:8024).
The :mod:urlparse module's :func:~urlparse.urlsplit now handles
unknown URL schemes in a fashion compliant with :rfc:3986: if the
URL is of the form "<something>://...", the text before the
:// is treated as the scheme, even if it's a made-up scheme that
the module doesn't know about. This change may break code that
worked around the old behaviour. For example, Python 2.6.4 or 2.5
will return the following:
.. doctest:: :options: +SKIP
import urlparse urlparse.urlsplit('invented://host/filename?query') ('invented', '', '//host/filename?query', '', '')
Python 2.7 (and Python 2.6.5) will return:
.. doctest:: :options: +SKIP
import urlparse urlparse.urlsplit('invented://host/filename?query') ('invented', 'host', '/filename?query', '', '')
(Python 2.7 actually produces slightly different output, since it returns a named tuple instead of a standard tuple.)
The :mod:urlparse module also supports IPv6 literal addresses as defined by
:rfc:2732 (contributed by Senthil Kumaran; :issue:2987).
.. doctest:: :options: +SKIP
urlparse.urlparse('http://[1080::8:800:200C:417A]/foo') ParseResult(scheme='http', netloc='[1080::8:800:200C:417A]', path='/foo', params='', query='', fragment='')
New class: the :class:~weakref.WeakSet class in the :mod:weakref
module is a set that only holds weak references to its elements; elements
will be removed once there are no references pointing to them.
(Originally implemented in Python 3.x by Raymond Hettinger, and backported
to 2.7 by Michael Foord.)
The ElementTree library, :mod:xml.etree, no longer escapes
ampersands and angle brackets when outputting an XML processing
instruction (which looks like <?xml-stylesheet href="#style1"?>)
or comment (which looks like <!-- comment -->).
(Patch by Neil Muller; :issue:2746.)
The XML-RPC client and server, provided by the :mod:xmlrpclib and
:mod:SimpleXMLRPCServer modules, have improved performance by
supporting HTTP/1.1 keep-alive and by optionally using gzip encoding
to compress the XML being exchanged. The gzip compression is
controlled by the :attr:encode_threshold attribute of
:class:SimpleXMLRPCRequestHandler, which contains a size in bytes;
responses larger than this will be compressed.
(Contributed by Kristján Valur Jónsson; :issue:6267.)
The :mod:zipfile module's :class:~zipfile.ZipFile now supports the context
management protocol, so you can write with zipfile.ZipFile(...) as f:.
(Contributed by Brian Curtin; :issue:5511.)
:mod:zipfile now also supports archiving empty directories and
extracts them correctly. (Fixed by Kuba Wieczorek; :issue:4710.)
Reading files out of an archive is faster, and interleaving
:meth:~zipfile.ZipFile.read and :meth:~zipfile.ZipFile.readline now works correctly.
(Contributed by Nir Aides; :issue:7610.)
The :func:~zipfile.is_zipfile function now
accepts a file object, in addition to the path names accepted in earlier
versions. (Contributed by Gabriel Genellina; :issue:4756.)
The :meth:~zipfile.ZipFile.writestr method now has an optional compress_type parameter
that lets you override the default compression method specified in the
:class:~zipfile.ZipFile constructor. (Contributed by Ronald Oussoren;
:issue:6003.)
.. ====================================================================== .. whole new modules get described in subsections here
.. _importlib-section:
Python 3.1 includes the :mod:importlib package, a re-implementation
of the logic underlying Python's :keyword:import statement.
:mod:importlib is useful for implementors of Python interpreters and
to users who wish to write new importers that can participate in the
import process. Python 2.7 doesn't contain the complete
:mod:importlib package, but instead has a tiny subset that contains
a single function, :func:~importlib.import_module.
import_module(name, package=None) imports a module. name is
a string containing the module or package's name. It's possible to do
relative imports by providing a string that begins with a .
character, such as ..utils.errors. For relative imports, the
package argument must be provided and is the name of the package that
will be used as the anchor for
the relative import. :func:~importlib.import_module both inserts the imported
module into sys.modules and returns the module object.
Here are some examples::
>>> from importlib import import_module
>>> anydbm = import_module('anydbm') # Standard absolute import
>>> anydbm
<module 'anydbm' from '/p/python/Lib/anydbm.py'>
>>> # Relative import
>>> file_util = import_module('..file_util', 'distutils.command')
>>> file_util
<module 'distutils.file_util' from '/python/Lib/distutils/file_util.pyc'>
:mod:importlib was implemented by Brett Cannon and introduced in
Python 3.1.
The :mod:sysconfig module has been pulled out of the Distutils
package, becoming a new top-level module in its own right.
:mod:sysconfig provides functions for getting information about
Python's build process: compiler switches, installation paths, the
platform name, and whether Python is running from its source
directory.
Some of the functions in the module are:
~sysconfig.get_config_var returns variables from Python's
Makefile and the :file:pyconfig.h file.~sysconfig.get_config_vars returns a dictionary containing
all of the configuration variables.~sysconfig.get_path returns the configured path for
a particular type of module: the standard library,
site-specific modules, platform-specific modules, etc.~sysconfig.is_python_build returns true if you're running a
binary from a Python source tree, and false otherwise.Consult the :mod:sysconfig documentation for more details and for
a complete list of functions.
The Distutils package and :mod:sysconfig are now maintained by Tarek
Ziadé, who has also started a Distutils2 package (source repository at
https://hg.python.org/distutils2/) for developing a next-generation
version of Distutils.
Tcl/Tk 8.5 includes a set of themed widgets that re-implement basic Tk widgets but have a more customizable appearance and can therefore more closely resemble the native platform's widgets. This widget set was originally called Tile, but was renamed to Ttk (for "themed Tk") on being added to Tcl/Tck release 8.5.
To learn more, read the :mod:ttk module documentation. You may also
wish to read the Tcl/Tk manual page describing the
Ttk theme engine, available at
https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/TkCmd/ttk_intro.htm. Some
screenshots of the Python/Ttk code in use are at
https://code.google.com/archive/p/python-ttk/wikis/Screenshots.wiki.
The :mod:ttk module was written by Guilherme Polo and added in
:issue:2983. An alternate version called Tile.py, written by
Martin Franklin and maintained by Kevin Walzer, was proposed for
inclusion in :issue:2618, but the authors argued that Guilherme
Polo's work was more comprehensive.
.. _unittest-section:
The :mod:unittest module was greatly enhanced; many
new features were added. Most of these features were implemented
by Michael Foord, unless otherwise noted. The enhanced version of
the module is downloadable separately for use with Python versions 2.4 to 2.6,
packaged as the :mod:unittest2 package, from
https://pypi.org/project/unittest2.
When used from the command line, the module can automatically discover
tests. It's not as fancy as py.test <http://pytest.org>__ or
nose <https://nose.readthedocs.io/>__, but provides a
simple way to run tests kept within a set of package directories. For example,
the following command will search the :file:test/ subdirectory for
any importable test files named test*.py::
python -m unittest discover -s test
Consult the :mod:unittest module documentation for more details.
(Developed in :issue:6001.)
The :func:~unittest.main function supports some other new options:
:option:-b <unittest -b> or :option:!--buffer will buffer the standard output
and standard error streams during each test. If the test passes,
any resulting output will be discarded; on failure, the buffered
output will be displayed.
:option:-c <unittest -c> or :option:!--catch will cause the control-C interrupt
to be handled more gracefully. Instead of interrupting the test
process immediately, the currently running test will be completed
and then the partial results up to the interruption will be reported.
If you're impatient, a second press of control-C will cause an immediate
interruption.
This control-C handler tries to avoid causing problems when the code
being tested or the tests being run have defined a signal handler of
their own, by noticing that a signal handler was already set and
calling it. If this doesn't work for you, there's a
:func:~unittest.removeHandler decorator that can be used to mark tests that
should have the control-C handling disabled.
:option:-f <unittest -f> or :option:!--failfast makes
test execution stop immediately when a test fails instead of
continuing to execute further tests. (Suggested by Cliff Dyer and
implemented by Michael Foord; :issue:8074.)
The progress messages now show 'x' for expected failures and 'u' for unexpected successes when run in verbose mode. (Contributed by Benjamin Peterson.)
Test cases can raise the :exc:~unittest.SkipTest exception to skip a
test (:issue:1034053).
The error messages for :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertEqual,
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertTrue, and :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertFalse
failures now provide more information. If you set the
:attr:~unittest.TestCase.longMessage attribute of your :class:~unittest.TestCase classes to
true, both the standard error message and any additional message you
provide will be printed for failures. (Added by Michael Foord; :issue:5663.)
The :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertRaises method now
returns a context handler when called without providing a callable
object to run. For example, you can write this::
with self.assertRaises(KeyError): {}['foo']
(Implemented by Antoine Pitrou; :issue:4444.)
.. rev 78774
Module- and class-level setup and teardown fixtures are now supported.
Modules can contain :func:~unittest.setUpModule and :func:~unittest.tearDownModule
functions. Classes can have :meth:~unittest.TestCase.setUpClass and
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.tearDownClass methods that must be defined as class methods
(using @classmethod or equivalent). These functions and
methods are invoked when the test runner switches to a test case in a
different module or class.
The methods :meth:~unittest.TestCase.addCleanup and
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.doCleanups were added.
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.addCleanup lets you add cleanup functions that
will be called unconditionally (after :meth:~unittest.TestCase.setUp if
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.setUp fails, otherwise after :meth:~unittest.TestCase.tearDown). This allows
for much simpler resource allocation and deallocation during tests
(:issue:5679).
A number of new methods were added that provide more specialized
tests. Many of these methods were written by Google engineers
for use in their test suites; Gregory P. Smith, Michael Foord, and
GvR worked on merging them into Python's version of :mod:unittest.
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertIsNone and :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertIsNotNone take one
expression and verify that the result is or is not None.
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertIs and :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertIsNot
take two values and check whether the two values evaluate to the same object or not.
(Added by Michael Foord; :issue:2578.)
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertIsInstance and
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertNotIsInstance check whether
the resulting object is an instance of a particular class, or of
one of a tuple of classes. (Added by Georg Brandl; :issue:7031.)
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertGreater, :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertGreaterEqual,
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertLess, and :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertLessEqual compare
two quantities.
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertMultiLineEqual compares two strings, and if they're
not equal, displays a helpful comparison that highlights the
differences in the two strings. This comparison is now used by
default when Unicode strings are compared with :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertEqual.
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertRegexpMatches and
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertNotRegexpMatches checks whether the
first argument is a string matching or not matching the regular
expression provided as the second argument (:issue:8038).
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertRaisesRegexp checks whether a particular exception
is raised, and then also checks that the string representation of
the exception matches the provided regular expression.
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertIn and :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertNotIn
tests whether first is or is not in second.
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertItemsEqual tests whether two provided sequences
contain the same elements.
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertSetEqual compares whether two sets are equal, and
only reports the differences between the sets in case of error.
Similarly, :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertListEqual and :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertTupleEqual
compare the specified types and explain any differences without necessarily
printing their full values; these methods are now used by default
when comparing lists and tuples using :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertEqual.
More generally, :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertSequenceEqual compares two sequences
and can optionally check whether both sequences are of a
particular type.
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertDictEqual compares two dictionaries and reports the
differences; it's now used by default when you compare two dictionaries
using :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertEqual. :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertDictContainsSubset checks whether
all of the key/value pairs in first are found in second.
:meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertAlmostEqual and :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertNotAlmostEqual test
whether first and second are approximately equal. This method
can either round their difference to an optionally-specified number
of places (the default is 7) and compare it to zero, or require
the difference to be smaller than a supplied delta value.
:meth:~unittest.TestLoader.loadTestsFromName properly honors the
:attr:~unittest.TestLoader.suiteClass attribute of
the :class:~unittest.TestLoader. (Fixed by Mark Roddy; :issue:6866.)
A new hook lets you extend the :meth:~unittest.TestCase.assertEqual method to handle
new data types. The :meth:~unittest.TestCase.addTypeEqualityFunc method takes a type
object and a function. The function will be used when both of the
objects being compared are of the specified type. This function
should compare the two objects and raise an exception if they don't
match; it's a good idea for the function to provide additional
information about why the two objects aren't matching, much as the new
sequence comparison methods do.
:func:unittest.main now takes an optional exit argument. If
false, :func:~unittest.main doesn't call :func:sys.exit, allowing
:func:~unittest.main to be used from the interactive interpreter.
(Contributed by J. Pablo Fernández; :issue:3379.)
:class:~unittest.TestResult has new :meth:~unittest.TestResult.startTestRun and
:meth:~unittest.TestResult.stopTestRun methods that are called immediately before
and after a test run. (Contributed by Robert Collins; :issue:5728.)
With all these changes, the :file:unittest.py was becoming awkwardly
large, so the module was turned into a package and the code split into
several files (by Benjamin Peterson). This doesn't affect how the
module is imported or used.
.. seealso::
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/unittest2.shtml Describes the new features, how to use them, and the rationale for various design decisions. (By Michael Foord.)
.. _elementtree-section:
The version of the ElementTree library included with Python was updated to version 1.3. Some of the new features are:
The various parsing functions now take a parser keyword argument
giving an :class:~xml.etree.ElementTree.XMLParser instance that will
be used. This makes it possible to override the file's internal encoding::
p = ET.XMLParser(encoding='utf-8') t = ET.XML("""<root/>""", parser=p)
Errors in parsing XML now raise a :exc:ParseError exception, whose
instances have a :attr:position attribute
containing a (line, column) tuple giving the location of the problem.
ElementTree's code for converting trees to a string has been
significantly reworked, making it roughly twice as fast in many
cases. The :meth:ElementTree.write() <xml.etree.ElementTree.ElementTree.write>
and :meth:Element.write methods now have a method parameter that can be
"xml" (the default), "html", or "text". HTML mode will output empty
elements as <empty></empty> instead of <empty/>, and text
mode will skip over elements and only output the text chunks. If
you set the :attr:tag attribute of an element to None but
leave its children in place, the element will be omitted when the
tree is written out, so you don't need to do more extensive rearrangement
to remove a single element.
Namespace handling has also been improved. All xmlns:<whatever>
declarations are now output on the root element, not scattered throughout
the resulting XML. You can set the default namespace for a tree
by setting the :attr:default_namespace attribute and can
register new prefixes with :meth:~xml.etree.ElementTree.register_namespace. In XML mode,
you can use the true/false xml_declaration parameter to suppress the
XML declaration.
New :class:~xml.etree.ElementTree.Element method:
:meth:~xml.etree.ElementTree.Element.extend appends the items from a
sequence to the element's children. Elements themselves behave like
sequences, so it's easy to move children from one element to
another::
from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
t = ET.XML("""<list> <item>1</item> <item>2</item> <item>3</item> </list>""") new = ET.XML('<root/>') new.extend(t)
print ET.tostring(new)
New :class:Element method:
:meth:~xml.etree.ElementTree.Element.iter yields the children of the
element as a generator. It's also possible to write for child in elem: to loop over an element's children. The existing method
:meth:getiterator is now deprecated, as is :meth:getchildren
which constructs and returns a list of children.
New :class:Element method:
:meth:~xml.etree.ElementTree.Element.itertext yields all chunks of
text that are descendants of the element. For example::
t = ET.XML("""<list> <item>1</item> <item>2</item> <item>3</item> </list>""")
print list(t.itertext())
Deprecated: using an element as a Boolean (i.e., if elem:) would
return true if the element had any children, or false if there were
no children. This behaviour is confusing -- None is false, but
so is a childless element? -- so it will now trigger a
:exc:FutureWarning. In your code, you should be explicit: write
len(elem) != 0 if you're interested in the number of children,
or elem is not None.
Fredrik Lundh develops ElementTree and produced the 1.3 version;
you can read his article describing 1.3 at
http://effbot.org/zone/elementtree-13-intro.htm.
Florent Xicluna updated the version included with
Python, after discussions on python-dev and in :issue:6472.)
.. ======================================================================
Changes to Python's build process and to the C API include:
The latest release of the GNU Debugger, GDB 7, can be scripted using Python <https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Python.html>__.
When you begin debugging an executable program P, GDB will look for
a file named P-gdb.py and automatically read it. Dave Malcolm
contributed a :file:python-gdb.py that adds a number of
commands useful when debugging Python itself. For example,
py-up and py-down go up or down one Python stack frame,
which usually corresponds to several C stack frames. py-print
prints the value of a Python variable, and py-bt prints the
Python stack trace. (Added as a result of :issue:8032.)
If you use the :file:.gdbinit file provided with Python,
the "pyo" macro in the 2.7 version now works correctly when the thread being
debugged doesn't hold the GIL; the macro now acquires it before printing.
(Contributed by Victor Stinner; :issue:3632.)
:c:func:Py_AddPendingCall is now thread-safe, letting any
worker thread submit notifications to the main Python thread. This
is particularly useful for asynchronous IO operations.
(Contributed by Kristján Valur Jónsson; :issue:4293.)
New function: :c:func:PyCode_NewEmpty creates an empty code object;
only the filename, function name, and first line number are required.
This is useful for extension modules that are attempting to
construct a more useful traceback stack. Previously such
extensions needed to call :c:func:PyCode_New, which had many
more arguments. (Added by Jeffrey Yasskin.)
New function: :c:func:PyErr_NewExceptionWithDoc creates a new
exception class, just as the existing :c:func:PyErr_NewException does,
but takes an extra char * argument containing the docstring for the
new exception class. (Added by 'lekma' on the Python bug tracker;
:issue:7033.)
New function: :c:func:PyFrame_GetLineNumber takes a frame object
and returns the line number that the frame is currently executing.
Previously code would need to get the index of the bytecode
instruction currently executing, and then look up the line number
corresponding to that address. (Added by Jeffrey Yasskin.)
New functions: :c:func:PyLong_AsLongAndOverflow and
:c:func:PyLong_AsLongLongAndOverflow approximates a Python long
integer as a C :c:type:long or :c:type:long long.
If the number is too large to fit into
the output type, an overflow flag is set and returned to the caller.
(Contributed by Case Van Horsen; :issue:7528 and :issue:7767.)
New function: stemming from the rewrite of string-to-float conversion,
a new :c:func:PyOS_string_to_double function was added. The old
:c:func:PyOS_ascii_strtod and :c:func:PyOS_ascii_atof functions
are now deprecated.
New function: :c:func:PySys_SetArgvEx sets the value of
sys.argv and can optionally update sys.path to include the
directory containing the script named by sys.argv[0] depending
on the value of an updatepath parameter.
This function was added to close a security hole for applications
that embed Python. The old function, :c:func:PySys_SetArgv, would
always update sys.path, and sometimes it would add the current
directory. This meant that, if you ran an application embedding
Python in a directory controlled by someone else, attackers could
put a Trojan-horse module in the directory (say, a file named
:file:os.py) that your application would then import and run.
If you maintain a C/C++ application that embeds Python, check
whether you're calling :c:func:PySys_SetArgv and carefully consider
whether the application should be using :c:func:PySys_SetArgvEx
with updatepath set to false.
Security issue reported as CVE-2008-5983 <https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-5983>_;
discussed in :issue:5753, and fixed by Antoine Pitrou.
New macros: the Python header files now define the following macros:
:c:macro:Py_ISALNUM,
:c:macro:Py_ISALPHA,
:c:macro:Py_ISDIGIT,
:c:macro:Py_ISLOWER,
:c:macro:Py_ISSPACE,
:c:macro:Py_ISUPPER,
:c:macro:Py_ISXDIGIT,
:c:macro:Py_TOLOWER, and :c:macro:Py_TOUPPER.
All of these functions are analogous to the C
standard macros for classifying characters, but ignore the current
locale setting, because in
several places Python needs to analyze characters in a
locale-independent way. (Added by Eric Smith;
:issue:5793.)
.. XXX these macros don't seem to be described in the c-api docs.
Removed function: :c:macro:PyEval_CallObject is now only available
as a macro. A function version was being kept around to preserve
ABI linking compatibility, but that was in 1997; it can certainly be
deleted by now. (Removed by Antoine Pitrou; :issue:8276.)
New format codes: the :c:func:PyFormat_FromString,
:c:func:PyFormat_FromStringV, and :c:func:PyErr_Format functions now
accept %lld and %llu format codes for displaying
C's :c:type:long long types.
(Contributed by Mark Dickinson; :issue:7228.)
The complicated interaction between threads and process forking has
been changed. Previously, the child process created by
:func:os.fork might fail because the child is created with only a
single thread running, the thread performing the :func:os.fork.
If other threads were holding a lock, such as Python's import lock,
when the fork was performed, the lock would still be marked as
"held" in the new process. But in the child process nothing would
ever release the lock, since the other threads weren't replicated,
and the child process would no longer be able to perform imports.
Python 2.7 acquires the import lock before performing an
:func:os.fork, and will also clean up any locks created using the
:mod:threading module. C extension modules that have internal
locks, or that call :c:func:fork() themselves, will not benefit
from this clean-up.
(Fixed by Thomas Wouters; :issue:1590864.)
The :c:func:Py_Finalize function now calls the internal
:func:threading._shutdown function; this prevents some exceptions from
being raised when an interpreter shuts down.
(Patch by Adam Olsen; :issue:1722344.)
When using the :c:type:PyMemberDef structure to define attributes
of a type, Python will no longer let you try to delete or set a
:const:T_STRING_INPLACE attribute.
.. rev 79644
Global symbols defined by the :mod:ctypes module are now prefixed
with Py, or with _ctypes. (Implemented by Thomas
Heller; :issue:3102.)
New configure option: the :option:!--with-system-expat switch allows
building the :mod:pyexpat module to use the system Expat library.
(Contributed by Arfrever Frehtes Taifersar Arahesis; :issue:7609.)
New configure option: the
:option:!--with-valgrind option will now disable the pymalloc
allocator, which is difficult for the Valgrind memory-error detector
to analyze correctly.
Valgrind will therefore be better at detecting memory leaks and
overruns. (Contributed by James Henstridge; :issue:2422.)
New configure option: you can now supply an empty string to
:option:!--with-dbmliborder= in order to disable all of the various
DBM modules. (Added by Arfrever Frehtes Taifersar Arahesis;
:issue:6491.)
The :program:configure script now checks for floating-point rounding bugs
on certain 32-bit Intel chips and defines a :c:macro:X87_DOUBLE_ROUNDING
preprocessor definition. No code currently uses this definition,
but it's available if anyone wishes to use it.
(Added by Mark Dickinson; :issue:2937.)
:program:configure also now sets a :envvar:LDCXXSHARED Makefile
variable for supporting C++ linking. (Contributed by Arfrever
Frehtes Taifersar Arahesis; :issue:1222585.)
The build process now creates the necessary files for pkg-config
support. (Contributed by Clinton Roy; :issue:3585.)
The build process now supports Subversion 1.7. (Contributed by
Arfrever Frehtes Taifersar Arahesis; :issue:6094.)
.. _whatsnew27-capsules:
Python 3.1 adds a new C datatype, :c:type:PyCapsule, for providing a
C API to an extension module. A capsule is essentially the holder of
a C void * pointer, and is made available as a module attribute; for
example, the :mod:socket module's API is exposed as socket.CAPI,
and :mod:unicodedata exposes ucnhash_CAPI. Other extensions
can import the module, access its dictionary to get the capsule
object, and then get the void * pointer, which will usually point
to an array of pointers to the module's various API functions.
There is an existing data type already used for this,
:c:type:PyCObject, but it doesn't provide type safety. Evil code
written in pure Python could cause a segmentation fault by taking a
:c:type:PyCObject from module A and somehow substituting it for the
:c:type:PyCObject in module B. Capsules know their own name,
and getting the pointer requires providing the name:
.. code-block:: c
void *vtable;
if (!PyCapsule_IsValid(capsule, "mymodule.CAPI") { PyErr_SetString(PyExc_ValueError, "argument type invalid"); return NULL; }
vtable = PyCapsule_GetPointer(capsule, "mymodule.CAPI");
You are assured that vtable points to whatever you're expecting.
If a different capsule was passed in, :c:func:PyCapsule_IsValid would
detect the mismatched name and return false. Refer to
:ref:using-capsules for more information on using these objects.
Python 2.7 now uses capsules internally to provide various
extension-module APIs, but the :c:func:PyCObject_AsVoidPtr was
modified to handle capsules, preserving compile-time compatibility
with the :c:type:CObject interface. Use of
:c:func:PyCObject_AsVoidPtr will signal a
:exc:PendingDeprecationWarning, which is silent by default.
Implemented in Python 3.1 and backported to 2.7 by Larry Hastings;
discussed in :issue:5630.
.. ======================================================================
The :mod:msvcrt module now contains some constants from
the :file:crtassem.h header file:
:data:CRT_ASSEMBLY_VERSION,
:data:VC_ASSEMBLY_PUBLICKEYTOKEN,
and :data:LIBRARIES_ASSEMBLY_NAME_PREFIX.
(Contributed by David Cournapeau; :issue:4365.)
The :mod:_winreg module for accessing the registry now implements
the :func:~_winreg.CreateKeyEx and :func:~_winreg.DeleteKeyEx
functions, extended versions of previously-supported functions that
take several extra arguments. The :func:~_winreg.DisableReflectionKey,
:func:~_winreg.EnableReflectionKey, and :func:~_winreg.QueryReflectionKey
were also tested and documented.
(Implemented by Brian Curtin: :issue:7347.)
The new :c:func:_beginthreadex API is used to start threads, and
the native thread-local storage functions are now used.
(Contributed by Kristján Valur Jónsson; :issue:3582.)
The :func:os.kill function now works on Windows. The signal value
can be the constants :const:CTRL_C_EVENT,
:const:CTRL_BREAK_EVENT, or any integer. The first two constants
will send :kbd:Control-C and :kbd:Control-Break keystroke events to
subprocesses; any other value will use the :c:func:TerminateProcess
API. (Contributed by Miki Tebeka; :issue:1220212.)
The :func:os.listdir function now correctly fails
for an empty path. (Fixed by Hirokazu Yamamoto; :issue:5913.)
The :mod:mimelib module will now read the MIME database from
the Windows registry when initializing.
(Patch by Gabriel Genellina; :issue:4969.)
.. ======================================================================
The path /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages is now appended to
sys.path, in order to share added packages between the system
installation and a user-installed copy of the same version.
(Changed by Ronald Oussoren; :issue:4865.)
.. versionchanged:: 2.7.13
As of 2.7.13, this change was removed.
/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages, the site-packages directory
used by the Apple-supplied system Python 2.7 is no longer appended to
sys.path for user-installed Pythons such as from the python.org
installers. As of macOS 10.12, Apple changed how the system
site-packages directory is configured, which could cause installation
of pip components, like setuptools, to fail. Packages installed for
the system Python will no longer be shared with user-installed
Pythons. (:issue:28440)
SO_SETFIB constant, used with
:func:~socket.getsockopt/:func:~socket.setsockopt to select an
alternate routing table, is now available in the :mod:socket
module. (Added by Kyle VanderBeek; :issue:8235.)Two benchmark scripts, :file:iobench and :file:ccbench, were
added to the :file:Tools directory. :file:iobench measures the
speed of the built-in file I/O objects returned by :func:open
while performing various operations, and :file:ccbench is a
concurrency benchmark that tries to measure computing throughput,
thread switching latency, and IO processing bandwidth when
performing several tasks using a varying number of threads.
The :file:Tools/i18n/msgfmt.py script now understands plural
forms in :file:.po files. (Fixed by Martin von Löwis;
:issue:5464.)
When importing a module from a :file:.pyc or :file:.pyo file
with an existing :file:.py counterpart, the :attr:co_filename
attributes of the resulting code objects are overwritten when the
original filename is obsolete. This can happen if the file has been
renamed, moved, or is accessed through different paths. (Patch by
Ziga Seilnacht and Jean-Paul Calderone; :issue:1180193.)
The :file:regrtest.py script now takes a :option:!--randseed=
switch that takes an integer that will be used as the random seed
for the :option:!-r option that executes tests in random order.
The :option:!-r option also reports the seed that was used
(Added by Collin Winter.)
Another :file:regrtest.py switch is :option:!-j, which
takes an integer specifying how many tests run in parallel. This
allows reducing the total runtime on multi-core machines.
This option is compatible with several other options, including the
:option:!-R switch which is known to produce long runtimes.
(Added by Antoine Pitrou, :issue:6152.) This can also be used
with a new :option:!-F switch that runs selected tests in a loop
until they fail. (Added by Antoine Pitrou; :issue:7312.)
When executed as a script, the :file:py_compile.py module now
accepts '-' as an argument, which will read standard input for
the list of filenames to be compiled. (Contributed by Piotr
Ożarowski; :issue:8233.)
.. ======================================================================
This section lists previously described changes and other bugfixes that may require changes to your code:
The :func:range function processes its arguments more
consistently; it will now call :meth:__int__ on non-float,
non-integer arguments that are supplied to it. (Fixed by Alexander
Belopolsky; :issue:1533.)
The string :meth:format method changed the default precision used
for floating-point and complex numbers from 6 decimal
places to 12, which matches the precision used by :func:str.
(Changed by Eric Smith; :issue:5920.)
Because of an optimization for the :keyword:with statement, the special
methods :meth:__enter__ and :meth:__exit__ must belong to the object's
type, and cannot be directly attached to the object's instance. This
affects new-style classes (derived from :class:object) and C extension
types. (:issue:6101.)
Due to a bug in Python 2.6, the exc_value parameter to
:meth:__exit__ methods was often the string representation of the
exception, not an instance. This was fixed in 2.7, so exc_value
will be an instance as expected. (Fixed by Florent Xicluna;
:issue:7853.)
When a restricted set of attributes were set using __slots__,
deleting an unset attribute would not raise :exc:AttributeError
as you would expect. Fixed by Benjamin Peterson; :issue:7604.)
In the standard library:
Operations with :class:~datetime.datetime instances that resulted in a year
falling outside the supported range didn't always raise
:exc:OverflowError. Such errors are now checked more carefully
and will now raise the exception. (Reported by Mark Leander, patch
by Anand B. Pillai and Alexander Belopolsky; :issue:7150.)
When using :class:~decimal.Decimal instances with a string's
:meth:format method, the default alignment was previously
left-alignment. This has been changed to right-alignment, which might
change the output of your programs.
(Changed by Mark Dickinson; :issue:6857.)
Comparisons involving a signaling NaN value (or sNAN) now signal
:const:~decimal.InvalidOperation instead of silently returning a true or
false value depending on the comparison operator. Quiet NaN values
(or NaN) are now hashable. (Fixed by Mark Dickinson;
:issue:7279.)
The ElementTree library, :mod:xml.etree, no longer escapes
ampersands and angle brackets when outputting an XML processing
instruction (which looks like <?xml-stylesheet href="#style1"?>)
or comment (which looks like <!-- comment -->).
(Patch by Neil Muller; :issue:2746.)
The :meth:~StringIO.StringIO.readline method of :class:~StringIO.StringIO objects now does
nothing when a negative length is requested, as other file-like
objects do. (:issue:7348).
The :mod:syslog module will now use the value of sys.argv[0] as the
identifier instead of the previous default value of 'python'.
(Changed by Sean Reifschneider; :issue:8451.)
The :mod:tarfile module's default error handling has changed, to
no longer suppress fatal errors. The default error level was previously 0,
which meant that errors would only result in a message being written to the
debug log, but because the debug log is not activated by default,
these errors go unnoticed. The default error level is now 1,
which raises an exception if there's an error.
(Changed by Lars Gustäbel; :issue:7357.)
The :mod:urlparse module's :func:~urlparse.urlsplit now handles
unknown URL schemes in a fashion compliant with :rfc:3986: if the
URL is of the form "<something>://...", the text before the
:// is treated as the scheme, even if it's a made-up scheme that
the module doesn't know about. This change may break code that
worked around the old behaviour. For example, Python 2.6.4 or 2.5
will return the following:
.. doctest:: :options: +SKIP
import urlparse urlparse.urlsplit('invented://host/filename?query') ('invented', '', '//host/filename?query', '', '')
Python 2.7 (and Python 2.6.5) will return:
.. doctest:: :options: +SKIP
import urlparse urlparse.urlsplit('invented://host/filename?query') ('invented', 'host', '/filename?query', '', '')
(Python 2.7 actually produces slightly different output, since it returns a named tuple instead of a standard tuple.)
For C extensions:
C extensions that use integer format codes with the PyArg_Parse*
family of functions will now raise a :exc:TypeError exception
instead of triggering a :exc:DeprecationWarning (:issue:5080).
Use the new :c:func:PyOS_string_to_double function instead of the old
:c:func:PyOS_ascii_strtod and :c:func:PyOS_ascii_atof functions,
which are now deprecated.
For applications that embed Python:
PySys_SetArgvEx function was added, letting
applications close a security hole when the existing
:c:func:PySys_SetArgv function was used. Check whether you're
calling :c:func:PySys_SetArgv and carefully consider whether the
application should be using :c:func:PySys_SetArgvEx with
updatepath set to false... ======================================================================
.. _py27-maintenance-enhancements:
New features may be added to Python 2.7 maintenance releases when the situation genuinely calls for it. Any such additions must go through the Python Enhancement Proposal process, and make a compelling case for why they can't be adequately addressed by either adding the new feature solely to Python 3, or else by publishing it on the Python Package Index.
In addition to the specific proposals listed below, there is a general
exemption allowing new -3 warnings to be added in any Python 2.7
maintenance release.
In debug mode, the [xxx refs] statistic is not written by default, the
:envvar:PYTHONSHOWREFCOUNT environment variable now must also be set.
(Contributed by Victor Stinner; :issue:31733.)
When Python is compiled with COUNT_ALLOC defined, allocation counts are no
longer dumped by default anymore: the :envvar:PYTHONSHOWALLOCCOUNT environment
variable must now also be set. Moreover, allocation counts are now dumped into
stderr, rather than stdout. (Contributed by Victor Stinner; :issue:31692.)
.. versionadded:: 2.7.15
:pep:434 describes a general exemption for changes made to the IDLE
development environment shipped along with Python. This exemption makes it
possible for the IDLE developers to provide a more consistent user
experience across all supported versions of Python 2 and 3.
For details of any IDLE changes, refer to the NEWS file for the specific release.
:pep:466 describes a number of network security enhancement proposals
that have been approved for inclusion in Python 2.7 maintenance releases,
with the first of those changes appearing in the Python 2.7.7 release.
:pep:466 related features added in Python 2.7.7:
:func:hmac.compare_digest was backported from Python 3 to make a timing
attack resistant comparison operation available to Python 2 applications.
(Contributed by Alex Gaynor; :issue:21306.)
OpenSSL 1.0.1g was upgraded in the official Windows installers published on
python.org. (Contributed by Zachary Ware; :issue:21462.)
:pep:466 related features added in Python 2.7.8:
:func:hashlib.pbkdf2_hmac was backported from Python 3 to make a hashing
algorithm suitable for secure password storage broadly available to Python
2 applications. (Contributed by Alex Gaynor; :issue:21304.)
OpenSSL 1.0.1h was upgraded for the official Windows installers published on
python.org. (contributed by Zachary Ware in :issue:21671 for CVE-2014-0224)
:pep:466 related features added in Python 2.7.9:
Most of Python 3.4's :mod:ssl module was backported. This means :mod:ssl
now supports Server Name Indication, TLS1.x settings, access to the platform
certificate store, the :class:~ssl.SSLContext class, and other
features. (Contributed by Alex Gaynor and David Reid; :issue:21308.)
Refer to the "Version added: 2.7.9" notes in the module documentation for specific details.
:func:os.urandom was changed to cache a file descriptor to /dev/urandom
instead of reopening /dev/urandom on every call. (Contributed by Alex
Gaynor; :issue:21305.)
:data:hashlib.algorithms_guaranteed and
:data:hashlib.algorithms_available were backported from Python 3 to make
it easier for Python 2 applications to select the strongest available hash
algorithm. (Contributed by Alex Gaynor in :issue:21307)
:pep:477 approves the inclusion of the :pep:453 ensurepip module and the
improved documentation that was enabled by it in the Python 2.7 maintenance
releases, appearing first in the Python 2.7.9 release.
Bootstrapping pip By Default
The new :mod:`ensurepip` module (defined in :pep:`453`) provides a standard
cross-platform mechanism to bootstrap the pip installer into Python
installations. The version of ``pip`` included with Python 2.7.9 is ``pip``
1.5.6, and future 2.7.x maintenance releases will update the bundled version to
the latest version of ``pip`` that is available at the time of creating the
release candidate.
By default, the commands ``pip``, ``pipX`` and ``pipX.Y`` will be installed on
all platforms (where X.Y stands for the version of the Python installation),
along with the ``pip`` Python package and its dependencies.
For CPython :ref:`source builds on POSIX systems <building-python-on-unix>`,
the ``make install`` and ``make altinstall`` commands do not bootstrap ``pip``
by default. This behaviour can be controlled through configure options, and
overridden through Makefile options.
On Windows and Mac OS X, the CPython installers now default to installing
``pip`` along with CPython itself (users may opt out of installing it
during the installation process). Window users will need to opt in to the
automatic ``PATH`` modifications to have ``pip`` available from the command
line by default, otherwise it can still be accessed through the Python
launcher for Windows as ``py -m pip``.
As `discussed in the PEP`__, platform packagers may choose not to install
these commands by default, as long as, when invoked, they provide clear and
simple directions on how to install them on that platform (usually using
the system package manager).
__ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0477/#disabling-ensurepip-by-downstream-distributors
Documentation Changes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As part of this change, the :ref:`installing-index` and
:ref:`distributing-index` sections of the documentation have been
completely redesigned as short getting started and FAQ documents. Most
packaging documentation has now been moved out to the Python Packaging
Authority maintained `Python Packaging User Guide
<http://packaging.python.org>`__ and the documentation of the individual
projects.
However, as this migration is currently still incomplete, the legacy
versions of those guides remaining available as :ref:`install-index`
and :ref:`distutils-index`.
.. seealso::
:pep:`453` -- Explicit bootstrapping of pip in Python installations
PEP written by Donald Stufft and Nick Coghlan, implemented by
Donald Stufft, Nick Coghlan, Martin von Löwis and Ned Deily.
PEP 476: Enabling certificate verification by default for stdlib http clients
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
:pep:`476` updated :mod:`httplib` and modules which use it, such as
:mod:`urllib2` and :mod:`xmlrpclib`, to now verify that the server
presents a certificate which is signed by a Certificate Authority in the
platform trust store and whose hostname matches the hostname being requested
by default, significantly improving security for many applications. This
change was made in the Python 2.7.9 release.
For applications which require the old previous behavior, they can pass an
alternate context::
import urllib2
import ssl
# This disables all verification
context = ssl._create_unverified_context()
# This allows using a specific certificate for the host, which doesn't need
# to be in the trust store
context = ssl.create_default_context(cafile="/path/to/file.crt")
urllib2.urlopen("https://invalid-cert", context=context)
PEP 493: HTTPS verification migration tools for Python 2.7
----------------------------------------------------------
:pep:`493` provides additional migration tools to support a more incremental
infrastructure upgrade process for environments containing applications and
services relying on the historically permissive processing of server
certificates when establishing client HTTPS connections. These additions were
made in the Python 2.7.12 release.
These tools are intended for use in cases where affected applications and
services can't be modified to explicitly pass a more permissive SSL context
when establishing the connection.
For applications and services which can't be modified at all, the new
``PYTHONHTTPSVERIFY`` environment variable may be set to ``0`` to revert an
entire Python process back to the default permissive behaviour of Python 2.7.8
and earlier.
For cases where the connection establishment code can't be modified, but the
overall application can be, the new :func:`ssl._https_verify_certificates`
function can be used to adjust the default behaviour at runtime.
New ``make regen-all`` build target
-----------------------------------
To simplify cross-compilation, and to ensure that CPython can reliably be
compiled without requiring an existing version of Python to already be
available, the autotools-based build system no longer attempts to implicitly
recompile generated files based on file modification times.
Instead, a new ``make regen-all`` command has been added to force regeneration
of these files when desired (e.g. after an initial version of Python has
already been built based on the pregenerated versions).
More selective regeneration targets are also defined - see
:source:`Makefile.pre.in` for details.
(Contributed by Victor Stinner in :issue:`23404`.)
.. versionadded:: 2.7.14
Removal of ``make touch`` build target
--------------------------------------
The ``make touch`` build target previously used to request implicit regeneration
of generated files by updating their modification times has been removed.
It has been replaced by the new ``make regen-all`` target.
(Contributed by Victor Stinner in :issue:`23404`.)
.. versionchanged:: 2.7.14
.. ======================================================================
.. _acks27:
Acknowledgements
================
The author would like to thank the following people for offering
suggestions, corrections and assistance with various drafts of this
article: Nick Coghlan, Philip Jenvey, Ryan Lovett, R. David Murray,
Hugh Secker-Walker.