Compatible AST construction and ast.unparse
for Python 3.5-3.13.
-
backward compatibility for constructing ASTs
For instance,
ast.arguments
is changed since Python 3.8, that another fieldposonlyarg
is introduced, hence you should construct anast.arguments
with an additional argumentposonlyarg=...
since Python 3.8 and it wouldn't work if your code is written before Python 3.8.Through
ast_compat
, you don't have to worry about above question if a new argument is optional or a list.Note that you should use
ast_compat.XXX
instead ofast.XXX
to construct ASTs. -
Support ast.Constant before Python 3.6.
ast.Constant
is convenient, and things likeast.Num
are redundant according to this observation and improvement: https://bugs.python.org/issue32892However,
ast.Constant
is not available in 3.5 or earlier versions, thus we backportast.Constant
in this library.To access the content of
ast.Constant
in a compatible way, useast_compat.get_constant
instead of.value
. -
Support dumping AST to string with ast_compat.unparse, which synchronizes the tooling code provided by CPython official repo.
import ast_compat as astc
from ast_compat import get_constant
assert get_constant(astc.Constant((1, 2))) == (1, 2)
empty_args = astc.arguments() # work for all of Python 3.5-3.13
The compatibility is following the specification of Python ASTs, i.e, the ADSL file you can find at
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/<branch/tag>/Parser/Python.asdl
.
We parse the file, and generate verifications and default argument factories,
check ast_compat/compat3k*_{ast|unparse}.py
. To explain, ast_compat/compat3k5_*.py
is for
Python 3.5, and ast_compat/compat3k9_*.py
is for Python 3.9.
The file of generator is generate_ast_compat.py
, and the use of generator API is in this way:
from generate_ast_compat import compat
compat((3, 5)) # generate ast_compat/compat3k5_ast.py and ast_compat/compat3k5_unparse.py
compat((3, 6))
compat((3, 7))
compat((3, 8))
prerelease_url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python/cpython/v3.9.0a3/parser/python.asdl"
compat((3, 9), prerelease_url)
The code generation needs Python 3.7+, though this library works for Python 3.5 and 3.5+.