toolz

Introduction to Toolz

Toolz is a collection of utility functions designed to work with iterators, functions, and dictionaries in Python. This project is aimed at providing tools that facilitate these operations efficiently, drawing inspiration from functional programming languages known for their list processing capabilities. The official documentation for Toolz is available here.

License

Toolz is released under the New BSD License, which encourages open-source distribution and use. The specific terms can be found in the License File.

Installation

Toolz is readily available on the Python Package Index (PyPI) and can be installed using the command:

pip install toolz

Structure and Heritage

Toolz is divided into three main components:

• Itertoolz: This module provides utility functions for iterable operations. Some examples include groupby, which groups elements, unique, which filters duplicates, and interpose, which places elements between existing ones. More details are available in the itertoolz.py source file.

• Functoolz: This part focuses on higher-order functions, which are functions that either take other functions as arguments or return them. Examples include memoize, to cache results of expensive function calls, curry, for partial function application, and compose, for function composition. Further information can be found in the functoolz.py source file.

• Dicttoolz: This module offers functions for dictionary operations, such as assoc, which associates a key with a value, update-in, which updates a nested dictionary value, and merge, which combines multiple dictionaries. The dicttoolz.py source file provides additional details.

These functions stem from the traditions of functional programming languages, emphasizing list processing and interoperability to solve complex tasks efficiently.

Example of Use

Here's a simple example demonstrating how to build a word count function using elements from Toolz:

def stem(word):
    """ Stem word to primitive form """
    return word.lower().rstrip(",.!:;'-\"").lstrip("'\"")

from toolz import compose, frequencies
from toolz.curried import map
wordcount = compose(frequencies, map(stem), str.split)

sentence = "This cat jumped over this other cat!"
result = wordcount(sentence)
# Output: {'this': 2, 'cat': 2, 'jumped': 1, 'over': 1, 'other': 1}

Dependencies

Toolz supports Python 3.8 and above, with no dependencies beyond the standard library, making it a lightweight and versatile tool.

CyToolz

Toolz has a counterpart known as CyToolz, which is a reimplementation using Cython. CyToolz serves as a drop-in replacement for Toolz, providing enhanced performance benefits. More information is available on the CyToolz GitHub Page.

Related Libraries

Toolz shares similarities with several other libraries and languages that focus on functional programming and utility functions:

• Underscore.js: A similar library for JavaScript.
• Enumerable: A comparable library in Ruby.
• Clojure: A functional programming language whose standard library parallels Toolz.
• Python's own itertools and functools.

Contributions and Community

The Toolz project is open to contributions, especially those that enhance its utility functions grounded in functional programming traditions. Interested contributors can explore ideas on our issue page.

For community involvement, Toolz has an active mailing list where interested parties are welcome to join discussions and share insights.