What’s New In Python 3.3

Python documentation

This article explains the new features in Python 3.3, compared to 3.2. Python 3.3 was released on September 29, 2012. For full details, see the

changelog

.

See also

PEP 398

- Python 3.3 Release Schedule

Summary – Release highlights

New syntax features:

New yieldfrom expression for

generator delegation

.

The u'unicode' syntax is accepted again for

str

objects.

New library modules:

faulthandler

(helps debugging low-level crashes)

ipaddress

(high-level objects representing IP addresses and masks)

lzma

(compress data using the XZ / LZMA algorithm)

unittest.mock

(replace parts of your system under test with mock objects)

venv

(Python

virtual environments

, as in the popular virtualenv package)

New built-in features:

Reworked

I/O exception hierarchy

.

Implementation improvements:

Rewritten

import machinery

based on

importlib

.

More compact

unicode strings

.

More compact

attribute dictionaries

.

Significantly Improved Library Modules:

C Accelerator for the

decimal

module.

Better unicode handling in the

email

module (

provisional

).

Security improvements:

Hash randomization is switched on by default.

Please read on for a comprehensive list of user-facing changes.

PEP 405: Virtual Environments

Virtual environments help create separate Python setups while sharing a system-wide base install, for ease of maintenance. Virtual environments have their own set of private site packages (i.e. locally installed libraries), and are optionally segregated from the system-wide site packages. Their concept and implementation are inspired by the popular virtualenv third-party package, but benefit from tighter integration with the interpreter core.

This PEP adds the

venv

module for programmatic access, and the pyvenv script for command-line access and administration. The Python interpreter checks for a pyvenv.cfg, file whose existence signals the base of a virtual environment’s directory tree.

See also

PEP 405

- Python Virtual EnvironmentsPEP written by Carl Meyer; implementation by Carl Meyer and Vinay Sajip

PEP 420: Implicit Namespace Packages

Native support for package directories that don’t require __init__.py marker files and can automatically span multiple path segments (inspired by various third party approaches to namespace packages, as described in

PEP 420

)

See also

PEP 420

- Implicit Namespace PackagesPEP written by Eric V. Smith; implementation by Eric V. Smith and Barry Warsaw

PEP 3118: New memoryview implementation and buffer protocol documentation

The implementation of

PEP 3118

has been significantly improved.

The new memoryview implementation comprehensively fixes all ownership and lifetime issues of dynamically allocated fields in the Py_buffer struct that led to multiple crash reports. Additionally, several functions that crashed or returned incorrect results for non-contiguous or multi-dimensional input have been fixed.

The memoryview object now has a PEP-3118 compliant getbufferproc() that checks the consumer’s request type. Many new features have been added, most of them work in full generality for non-contiguous arrays and arrays with suboffsets.

The documentation has been updated, clearly spelling out responsibilities for both exporters and consumers. Buffer request flags are grouped into basic and compound flags. The memory layout of non-contiguous and multi-dimensional NumPy-style arrays is explained.

Features

All native single character format specifiers in struct module syntax (optionally prefixed with ‘@’) are now supported.

With some restrictions, the cast() method allows changing of format and shape of C-contiguous arrays.

Multi-dimensional list representations are supported for any array type.

Multi-dimensional comparisons are supported for any array type.

One-dimensional memoryviews of hashable (read-only) types with formats B, b or c are now hashable. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in

bpo-13411

.)

Arbitrary slicing of any 1-D arrays type is supported. For example, it is now possible to reverse a memoryview in O(1) by using a negative step.

API changes

The maximum number of dimensions is officially limited to 64.

The representation of empty shape, strides and suboffsets is now an empty tuple instead of None.

Accessing a memoryview element with format ‘B’ (unsigned bytes) now returns an integer (in accordance with the struct module syntax). For returning a bytes object the view must be cast to ‘c’ first.

memoryview comparisons now use the logical structure of the operands and compare all array elements by value. All format strings in struct module syntax are supported. Views with unrecognised format strings are still permitted, but will always compare as unequal, regardless of view contents.

For further changes see

Build and C API Changes

and

Porting C code

.

(Contributed by Stefan Krah in

bpo-10181

.)

See also

PEP 3118

- Revising the Buffer Protocol

PEP 393: Flexible String Representation

The Unicode string type is changed to support multiple internal representations, depending on the character with the largest Unicode ordinal (1, 2, or 4 bytes) in the represented string. This allows a space-efficient representation in common cases, but gives access to full UCS-4 on all systems. For compatibility with existing APIs, several representations may exist in parallel; over time, this compatibility should be phased out.

On the Python side, there should be no downside to this change.

On the C API side,

PEP 393

is fully backward compatible. The legacy API should remain available at least five years. Applications using the legacy API will not fully benefit of the memory reduction, or - worse - may use a bit more memory, because Python may have to maintain two versions of each string (in the legacy format and in the new efficient storage).

Functionality

Changes introduced by

PEP 393

are the following:

Python now always supports the full range of Unicode code points, including non-BMP ones (i.e. from U+0000 to U+10FFFF). The distinction between narrow and wide builds no longer exists and Python now behaves like a wide build, even under Windows.

With the death of narrow builds, the problems specific to narrow builds have also been fixed, for example:

len()

now always returns 1 for non-BMP characters, so len('\U0010FFFF')==1;

surrogate pairs are not recombined in string literals, so '\uDBFF\uDFFF'!='\U0010FFFF';

indexing or slicing non-BMP characters returns the expected value, so '\U0010FFFF'[0] now returns '\U0010FFFF' and not '\uDBFF';

all other functions in the standard library now correctly handle non-BMP code points.

The value of

sys.maxunicode

is now always 1114111 (0x10FFFF in hexadecimal). The PyUnicode_GetMax() function still returns either 0xFFFF or 0x10FFFF for backward compatibility, and it should not be used with the new Unicode API (see

bpo-13054

).

The ./configure flag --with-wide-unicode has been removed.

Performance and resource usage

The storage of Unicode strings now depends on the highest code point in the string:

pure ASCII and Latin1 strings (U+0000-U+00FF) use 1 byte per code point;

BMP strings (U+0000-U+FFFF) use 2 bytes per code point;

non-BMP strings (U+10000-U+10FFFF) use 4 bytes per code point.

The net effect is that for most applications, memory usage of string storage should decrease significantly - especially compared to former wide unicode builds - as, in many cases, strings will be pure ASCII even in international contexts (because many strings store non-human language data, such as XML fragments, HTTP headers, JSON-encoded data, etc.). We also hope that it will, for the same reasons, increase CPU cache efficiency on non-trivial applications. The memory usage of Python 3.3 is two to three times smaller than Python 3.2, and a little bit better than Python 2.7, on a Django benchmark (see the PEP for details).

See also

PEP 393

- Flexible String RepresentationPEP written by Martin von Löwis; implementation by Torsten Becker and Martin von Löwis.

PEP 397: Python Launcher for Windows

The Python 3.3 Windows installer now includes a py launcher application that can be used to launch Python applications in a version independent fashion.

This launcher is invoked implicitly when double-clicking *.py files. If only a single Python version is installed on the system, that version will be used to run the file. If multiple versions are installed, the most recent version is used by default, but this can be overridden by including a Unix-style “shebang line” in the Python script.

The launcher can also be used explicitly from the command line as the py application. Running py follows the same version selection rules as implicitly launching scripts, but a more specific version can be selected by passing appropriate arguments (such as -3 to request Python 3 when Python 2 is also installed, or -2.6 to specifically request an earlier Python version when a more recent version is installed).

In addition to the launcher, the Windows installer now includes an option to add the newly installed Python to the system PATH. (Contributed by Brian Curtin in

bpo-3561

.)

PEP 3151: Reworking the OS and IO exception hierarchy

The hierarchy of exceptions raised by operating system errors is now both simplified and finer-grained.

You don’t have to worry anymore about choosing the appropriate exception type between

OSError

,

IOError

,

EnvironmentError

,

WindowsError

, mmap.error,

socket.error

or

select.error

. All these exception types are now only one: OSError. The other names are kept as aliases for compatibility reasons.

Also, it is now easier to catch a specific error condition. Instead of inspecting the errno attribute (or args[0]) for a particular constant from the

errno

module, you can catch the adequate

OSError

subclass. The available subclasses are the following:

BlockingIOError

ChildProcessError

ConnectionError

FileExistsError

FileNotFoundError

InterruptedError

IsADirectoryError

NotADirectoryError

PermissionError

ProcessLookupError

TimeoutError

And the

ConnectionError

itself has finer-grained subclasses:

BrokenPipeError

ConnectionAbortedError

ConnectionRefusedError

ConnectionResetError

Thanks to the new exceptions, common usages of the

errno

can now be avoided. For example, the following code written for Python 3.2:

fromerrnoimportENOENT,EACCES,EPERMtry:withopen("document.txt")asf:content=f.read()exceptIOErroraserr:iferr.errno==ENOENT:print("document.txt file is missing")eliferr.errnoin(EACCES,EPERM):print("You are not allowed to read document.txt")else:raisecan now be written without the

errno

import and without manual inspection of exception attributes:

try:withopen("document.txt")asf:content=f.read()exceptFileNotFoundError:print("document.txt file is missing")exceptPermissionError:print("You are not allowed to read document.txt")See also

PEP 3151

- Reworking the OS and IO Exception HierarchyPEP written and implemented by Antoine Pitrou

PEP 380: Syntax for Delegating to a Subgenerator

PEP 380 adds the yieldfrom expression, allowing a

generator

to delegate part of its operations to another generator. This allows a section of code containing

yield

to be factored out and placed in another generator. Additionally, the subgenerator is allowed to return with a value, and the value is made available to the delegating generator.

While designed primarily for use in delegating to a subgenerator, the yieldfrom expression actually allows delegation to arbitrary subiterators.

For simple iterators, yieldfromiterable is essentially just a shortened form of foriteminiterable:yielditem:

>>> defg(x):... yield fromrange(x,0,-1)... yield fromrange(x)...>>> list(g(5))[5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4]However, unlike an ordinary loop, yieldfrom allows subgenerators to receive sent and thrown values directly from the calling scope, and return a final value to the outer generator:

>>> defaccumulate():... tally=0... while1:... next=yield... ifnextisNone:... returntally... tally+=next...>>> defgather_tallies(tallies):... while1:... tally=yield fromaccumulate()... tallies.append(tally)...>>> tallies=[]>>> acc=gather_tallies(tallies)>>> next(acc)# Ensure the accumulator is ready to accept values>>> foriinrange(4):... acc.send(i)...>>> acc.send(None)# Finish the first tally>>> foriinrange(5):... acc.send(i)...>>> acc.send(None)# Finish the second tally>>> tallies[6, 10]The main principle driving this change is to allow even generators that are designed to be used with the send and throw methods to be split into multiple subgenerators as easily as a single large function can be split into multiple subfunctions.

See also

PEP 380

- Syntax for Delegating to a SubgeneratorPEP written by Greg Ewing; implementation by Greg Ewing, integrated into 3.3 by Renaud Blanch, Ryan Kelly and Nick Coghlan; documentation by Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek and Nick Coghlan

PEP 409: Suppressing exception context

PEP 409 introduces new syntax that allows the display of the chained exception context to be disabled. This allows cleaner error messages in applications that convert between exception types:

>>> classD:... def__init__(self,extra):... self._extra_attributes=extra... def__getattr__(self,attr):... try:... returnself._extra_attributes[attr]... exceptKeyError:... raiseAttributeError(attr)fromNone...>>> D({}).xTraceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "<stdin>", line 8, in __getattr__AttributeError: xWithout the fromNone suffix to suppress the cause, the original exception would be displayed by default:

>>> classC:... def__init__(self,extra):... self._extra_attributes=extra... def__getattr__(self,attr):... try:... returnself._extra_attributes[attr]... exceptKeyError:... raiseAttributeError(attr)...>>> C({}).xTraceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 6, in __getattr__KeyError: 'x'During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "<stdin>", line 8, in __getattr__AttributeError: xNo debugging capability is lost, as the original exception context remains available if needed (for example, if an intervening library has incorrectly suppressed valuable underlying details):

>>> try:... D({}).x... exceptAttributeErrorasexc:... print(repr(exc.__context__))...KeyError('x',)See also

PEP 409

- Suppressing exception contextPEP written by Ethan Furman; implemented by Ethan Furman and Nick Coghlan.

PEP 414: Explicit Unicode literals

To ease the transition from Python 2 for Unicode aware Python applications that make heavy use of Unicode literals, Python 3.3 once again supports the “u” prefix for string literals. This prefix has no semantic significance in Python 3, it is provided solely to reduce the number of purely mechanical changes in migrating to Python 3, making it easier for developers to focus on the more significant semantic changes (such as the stricter default separation of binary and text data).

See also

PEP 414

- Explicit Unicode literalsPEP written by Armin Ronacher.

PEP 3155: Qualified name for classes and functions

Functions and class objects have a new

__qualname__

attribute representing the “path” from the module top-level to their definition. For global functions and classes, this is the same as

__name__

. For other functions and classes, it provides better information about where they were actually defined, and how they might be accessible from the global scope.

Example with (non-bound) methods:

>>> classC:... defmeth(self):... pass...>>> C.meth.__name__'meth'>>> C.meth.__qualname__'C.meth'Example with nested classes:

>>> classC:... classD:... defmeth(self):... pass...>>> C.D.__name__'D'>>> C.D.__qualname__'C.D'>>> C.D.meth.__name__'meth'>>> C.D.meth.__qualname__'C.D.meth'Example with nested functions:

>>> defouter():... definner():... pass... returninner...>>> outer().__name__'inner'>>> outer().__qualname__'outer.<locals>.inner'The string representation of those objects is also changed to include the new, more precise information:

>>> str(C.D)"<class '__main__.C.D'>">>> str(C.D.meth)'<function C.D.meth at 0x7f46b9fe31e0>'See also

PEP 3155

- Qualified name for classes and functionsPEP written and implemented by Antoine Pitrou.

PEP 412: Key-Sharing Dictionary

Dictionaries used for the storage of objects’ attributes are now able to share part of their internal storage between each other (namely, the part which stores the keys and their respective hashes). This reduces the memory consumption of programs creating many instances of non-builtin types.

See also

PEP 412

- Key-Sharing DictionaryPEP written and implemented by Mark Shannon.

PEP 362: Function Signature Object

A new function

inspect.signature()

makes introspection of python callables easy and straightforward. A broad range of callables is supported: python functions, decorated or not, classes, and

functools.partial()

objects. New classes

inspect.Signature

,

inspect.Parameter

and

inspect.BoundArguments

hold information about the call signatures, such as, annotations, default values, parameters kinds, and bound arguments, which considerably simplifies writing decorators and any code that validates or amends calling signatures or arguments.

See also

PEP 362

: - Function Signature ObjectPEP written by Brett Cannon, Yury Selivanov, Larry Hastings, Jiwon Seo; implemented by Yury Selivanov.

PEP 421: Adding sys.implementation

A new attribute on the

sys

module exposes details specific to the implementation of the currently running interpreter. The initial set of attributes on

sys.implementation

are name, version, hexversion, and cache_tag.

The intention of sys.implementation is to consolidate into one namespace the implementation-specific data used by the standard library. This allows different Python implementations to share a single standard library code base much more easily. In its initial state, sys.implementation holds only a small portion of the implementation-specific data. Over time that ratio will shift in order to make the standard library more portable.

One example of improved standard library portability is cache_tag. As of Python 3.3, sys.implementation.cache_tag is used by

importlib

to support

PEP 3147

compliance. Any Python implementation that uses importlib for its built-in import system may use cache_tag to control the caching behavior for modules.

SimpleNamespace

The implementation of sys.implementation also introduces a new type to Python:

types.SimpleNamespace

. In contrast to a mapping-based namespace, like

dict

, SimpleNamespace is attribute-based, like

object

. However, unlike object, SimpleNamespace instances are writable. This means that you can add, remove, and modify the namespace through normal attribute access.

See also

PEP 421

- Adding sys.implementationPEP written and implemented by Eric Snow.

Using importlib as the Implementation of Import

bpo-2377

- Replace __import__ w/ importlib.__import__

bpo-13959

- Re-implement parts of imp in pure Python

bpo-14605

- Make import machinery explicit

bpo-14646

- Require loaders set __loader__ and __package__

The

__import__()

function is now powered by

importlib.__import__()

. This work leads to the completion of “phase 2” of

PEP 302

. There are multiple benefits to this change. First, it has allowed for more of the machinery powering import to be exposed instead of being implicit and hidden within the C code. It also provides a single implementation for all Python VMs supporting Python 3.3 to use, helping to end any VM-specific deviations in import semantics. And finally it eases the maintenance of import, allowing for future growth to occur.

For the common user, there should be no visible change in semantics. For those whose code currently manipulates import or calls import programmatically, the code changes that might possibly be required are covered in the

Porting Python code

section of this document.

New APIs

One of the large benefits of this work is the exposure of what goes into making the import statement work. That means the various importers that were once implicit are now fully exposed as part of the

importlib

package.

The abstract base classes defined in

importlib.abc

have been expanded to properly delineate between

meta path finders

and

path entry finders

by introducing

importlib.abc.MetaPathFinder

and

importlib.abc.PathEntryFinder

, respectively. The old ABC of importlib.abc.Finder is now only provided for backwards-compatibility and does not enforce any method requirements.

In terms of finders,

importlib.machinery.FileFinder

exposes the mechanism used to search for source and bytecode files of a module. Previously this class was an implicit member of

sys.path_hooks

.

For loaders, the new abstract base class

importlib.abc.FileLoader

helps write a loader that uses the file system as the storage mechanism for a module’s code. The loader for source files (

importlib.machinery.SourceFileLoader

), sourceless bytecode files (

importlib.machinery.SourcelessFileLoader

), and extension modules (

importlib.machinery.ExtensionFileLoader

) are now available for direct use.

ImportError

now has name and path attributes which are set when there is relevant data to provide. The message for failed imports will also provide the full name of the module now instead of just the tail end of the module’s name.

The

importlib.invalidate_caches()

function will now call the method with the same name on all finders cached in

sys.path_importer_cache

to help clean up any stored state as necessary.

Visible Changes

For potential required changes to code, see the

Porting Python code

section.

Beyond the expanse of what

importlib

now exposes, there are other visible changes to import. The biggest is that

sys.meta_path

and

sys.path_hooks

now store all of the meta path finders and path entry hooks used by import. Previously the finders were implicit and hidden within the C code of import instead of being directly exposed. This means that one can now easily remove or change the order of the various finders to fit one’s needs.

Another change is that all modules have a __loader__ attribute, storing the loader used to create the module.

PEP 302

has been updated to make this attribute mandatory for loaders to implement, so in the future once 3rd-party loaders have been updated people will be able to rely on the existence of the attribute. Until such time, though, import is setting the module post-load.

Loaders are also now expected to set the __package__ attribute from

PEP 366

. Once again, import itself is already setting this on all loaders from

importlib

and import itself is setting the attribute post-load.

None is now inserted into

sys.path_importer_cache

when no finder can be found on

sys.path_hooks

. Since imp.NullImporter is not directly exposed on sys.path_hooks it could no longer be relied upon to always be available to use as a value representing no finder found.

All other changes relate to semantic changes which should be taken into consideration when updating code for Python 3.3, and thus should be read about in the

Porting Python code

section of this document.

(Implementation by Brett Cannon)

Other Language Changes

Some smaller changes made to the core Python language are:

Added support for Unicode name aliases and named sequences. Both

unicodedata.lookup()

and '\N{...}' now resolve name aliases, and unicodedata.lookup() resolves named sequences too.

(Contributed by Ezio Melotti in

bpo-12753

.)

Unicode database updated to UCD version 6.1.0

Equality comparisons on

range()

objects now return a result reflecting the equality of the underlying sequences generated by those range objects. (

bpo-13201

)

The count(), find(), rfind(), index() and rindex() methods of

bytes

and

bytearray

objects now accept an integer between 0 and 255 as their first argument.

(Contributed by Petri Lehtinen in

bpo-12170

.)

The rjust(), ljust(), and center() methods of

bytes

and

bytearray

now accept a bytearray for the fill argument. (Contributed by Petri Lehtinen in

bpo-12380

.)

New methods have been added to

list

and

bytearray

: copy() and clear() (

bpo-10516

). Consequently,

MutableSequence

now also defines a clear() method (

bpo-11388

).

Raw bytes literals can now be written rb"..." as well as br"...".

(Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in

bpo-13748

.)

dict.setdefault()

now does only one lookup for the given key, making it atomic when used with built-in types.

(Contributed by Filip Gruszczyński in

bpo-13521

.)

The error messages produced when a function call does not match the function signature have been significantly improved.

(Contributed by Benjamin Peterson.)

A Finer-Grained Import Lock

Previous versions of CPython have always relied on a global import lock. This led to unexpected annoyances, such as deadlocks when importing a module would trigger code execution in a different thread as a side-effect. Clumsy workarounds were sometimes employed, such as the

PyImport_ImportModuleNoBlock()

C API function.

In Python 3.3, importing a module takes a per-module lock. This correctly serializes importation of a given module from multiple threads (preventing the exposure of incompletely initialized modules), while eliminating the aforementioned annoyances.

(Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in

bpo-9260

.)

Builtin functions and types

open()

gets a new opener parameter: the underlying file descriptor for the file object is then obtained by calling opener with (file, flags). It can be used to use custom flags like

os.O_CLOEXEC

for example. The 'x' mode was added: open for exclusive creation, failing if the file already exists.

print()

: added the flush keyword argument. If the flush keyword argument is true, the stream is forcibly flushed.

hash()

: hash randomization is enabled by default, see

object.__hash__()

and

PYTHONHASHSEED

.

The

str

type gets a new

casefold()

method: return a casefolded copy of the string, casefolded strings may be used for caseless matching. For example, 'ß'.casefold() returns 'ss'.

The sequence documentation has been substantially rewritten to better explain the binary/text sequence distinction and to provide specific documentation sections for the individual builtin sequence types (

bpo-4966

).

New Modules

faulthandler

This new debug module

faulthandler

contains functions to dump Python tracebacks explicitly, on a fault (a crash like a segmentation fault), after a timeout, or on a user signal. Call

faulthandler.enable()

to install fault handlers for the

SIGSEGV

,

SIGFPE

,

SIGABRT

,

SIGBUS

, and

SIGILL

signals. You can also enable them at startup by setting the

PYTHONFAULTHANDLER

environment variable or by using

-X

faulthandler command line option.

Example of a segmentation fault on Linux:

$ python-q-Xfaulthandler >>> import ctypes>>> ctypes.string_at(0)Fatal Python error: Segmentation faultCurrent thread 0x00007fb899f39700: File "/home/python/cpython/Lib/ctypes/__init__.py", line 486 in string_at File "<stdin>", line 1 in <module>Segmentation faultipaddress

The new

ipaddress

module provides tools for creating and manipulating objects representing IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, networks and interfaces (i.e. an IP address associated with a specific IP subnet).

(Contributed by Google and Peter Moody in

PEP 3144

.)

lzma

The newly added

lzma

module provides data compression and decompression using the LZMA algorithm, including support for the .xz and .lzma file formats.

(Contributed by Nadeem Vawda and Per Øyvind Karlsen in

bpo-6715

.)

Improved Modules

abc

Improved support for abstract base classes containing descriptors composed with abstract methods. The recommended approach to declaring abstract descriptors is now to provide __isabstractmethod__ as a dynamically updated property. The built-in descriptors have been updated accordingly.

@abc.abstractproperty

has been deprecated, use

@property

with

@abc.abstractmethod

instead.

@abc.abstractclassmethod

has been deprecated, use

@classmethod

with

@abc.abstractmethod

instead.

@abc.abstractstaticmethod

has been deprecated, use

@staticmethod

with

@abc.abstractmethod

instead.

(Contributed by Darren Dale in

bpo-11610

.)

abc.ABCMeta.register()

now returns the registered subclass, which means it can now be used as a class decorator (

bpo-10868

).

array

The

array

module supports the longlong type using q and Q type codes.

(Contributed by Oren Tirosh and Hirokazu Yamamoto in

bpo-1172711

.)

base64

ASCII-only Unicode strings are now accepted by the decoding functions of the

base64

modern interface. For example, base64.b64decode('YWJj') returns b'abc'. (Contributed by Catalin Iacob in

bpo-13641

.)

binascii

In addition to the binary objects they normally accept, the a2b_ functions now all also accept ASCII-only strings as input. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in

bpo-13637

.)

bz2

The

bz2

module has been rewritten from scratch. In the process, several new features have been added:

New

bz2.open()

function: open a bzip2-compressed file in binary or text mode.

bz2.BZ2File

can now read from and write to arbitrary file-like objects, by means of its constructor’s fileobj argument.

(Contributed by Nadeem Vawda in

bpo-5863

.)

bz2.BZ2File

and

bz2.decompress()

can now decompress multi-stream inputs (such as those produced by the pbzip2 tool). bz2.BZ2File can now also be used to create this type of file, using the 'a' (append) mode.

(Contributed by Nir Aides in

bpo-1625

.)

bz2.BZ2File

now implements all of the

io.BufferedIOBase

API, except for the detach() and truncate() methods.

codecs

The

mbcs

codec has been rewritten to handle correctly replace and ignore error handlers on all Windows versions. The mbcs codec now supports all error handlers, instead of only replace to encode and ignore to decode.

A new Windows-only codec has been added: cp65001 (

bpo-13216

). It is the Windows code page 65001 (Windows UTF-8, CP_UTF8). For example, it is used by sys.stdout if the console output code page is set to cp65001 (e.g., using chcp65001 command).

Multibyte CJK decoders now resynchronize faster. They only ignore the first byte of an invalid byte sequence. For example, b'\xff\n'.decode('gb2312','replace') now returns a \n after the replacement character.

(

bpo-12016

)

Incremental CJK codec encoders are no longer reset at each call to their encode() methods. For example:

>>> importcodecs>>> encoder=codecs.getincrementalencoder('hz')('strict')>>> b''.join(encoder.encode(x)forxin'\u52ff\u65bd\u65bc\u4eba\u3002 Bye.')b'~{NpJ)l6HK!#~} Bye.'This example gives b'~{Np~}~{J)~}~{l6~}~{HK~}~{!#~}Bye.' with older Python versions.

(

bpo-12100

)

The unicode_internal codec has been deprecated.

collections

Addition of a new

ChainMap

class to allow treating a number of mappings as a single unit. (Written by Raymond Hettinger for

bpo-11089

, made public in

bpo-11297

.)

The abstract base classes have been moved in a new

collections.abc

module, to better differentiate between the abstract and the concrete collections classes. Aliases for ABCs are still present in the

collections

module to preserve existing imports. (

bpo-11085

)

The

Counter

class now supports the unary + and - operators, as well as the in-place operators +=, -=, |=, and &=. (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger in

bpo-13121

.)

contextlib

ExitStack

now provides a solid foundation for programmatic manipulation of context managers and similar cleanup functionality. Unlike the previous contextlib.nested API (which was deprecated and removed), the new API is designed to work correctly regardless of whether context managers acquire their resources in their __init__ method (for example, file objects) or in their __enter__ method (for example, synchronisation objects from the

threading

module).

(

bpo-13585

)

crypt

Addition of salt and modular crypt format (hashing method) and the mksalt() function to the crypt module.

(

bpo-10924

)

curses

If the

curses

module is linked to the ncursesw library, use Unicode functions when Unicode strings or characters are passed (e.g. waddwstr()), and bytes functions otherwise (e.g. waddstr()).

Use the locale encoding instead of utf-8 to encode Unicode strings.

curses.window

has a new

curses.window.encoding

attribute.

The

curses.window

class has a new

get_wch()

method to get a wide character

The

curses

module has a new

unget_wch()

function to push a wide character so the next

get_wch()

will return it

(Contributed by Iñigo Serna in

bpo-6755

.)

datetime

Equality comparisons between naive and aware

datetime

instances now return

False

instead of raising

TypeError

(

bpo-15006

).

New

datetime.datetime.timestamp()

method: Return POSIX timestamp corresponding to the

datetime

instance.

The

datetime.datetime.strftime()

method supports formatting years older than 1000.

The

datetime.datetime.astimezone()

method can now be called without arguments to convert datetime instance to the system timezone.

decimal

bpo-7652

- integrate fast native decimal arithmetic.C-module and libmpdec written by Stefan Krah.

The new C version of the decimal module integrates the high speed libmpdec library for arbitrary precision correctly rounded decimal floating-point arithmetic. libmpdec conforms to IBM’s General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.

Performance gains range from 10x for database applications to 100x for numerically intensive applications. These numbers are expected gains for standard precisions used in decimal floating-point arithmetic. Since the precision is user configurable, the exact figures may vary. For example, in integer bignum arithmetic the differences can be significantly higher.

The following table is meant as an illustration. Benchmarks are available at

https://www.bytereef.org/mpdecimal/quickstart.html

.

decimal.py

_decimal

speedup

pi

42.02s

0.345s

120x

telco

172.19s

5.68s

30x

psycopg

3.57s

0.29s

12x

Features

The

FloatOperation

signal optionally enables stricter semantics for mixing floats and Decimals.

If Python is compiled without threads, the C version automatically disables the expensive thread local context machinery. In this case, the variable

HAVE_THREADS

is set to False.

API changes

The C module has the following context limits, depending on the machine architecture:

32-bit

64-bit

MAX_PREC

425000000

999999999999999999

MAX_EMAX

425000000

999999999999999999

MIN_EMIN

-425000000

-999999999999999999

In the context templates (

DefaultContext

,

BasicContext

and

ExtendedContext

) the magnitude of

Emax

and

Emin

has changed to 999999.

The

Decimal

constructor in decimal.py does not observe the context limits and converts values with arbitrary exponents or precision exactly. Since the C version has internal limits, the following scheme is used: If possible, values are converted exactly, otherwise

InvalidOperation

is raised and the result is NaN. In the latter case it is always possible to use

create_decimal()

in order to obtain a rounded or inexact value.

The power function in decimal.py is always correctly rounded. In the C version, it is defined in terms of the correctly rounded

exp()

and

ln()

functions, but the final result is only “almost always correctly rounded”.

In the C version, the context dictionary containing the signals is a

MutableMapping

. For speed reasons,

flags

and

traps

always refer to the same MutableMapping that the context was initialized with. If a new signal dictionary is assigned, flags and traps are updated with the new values, but they do not reference the RHS dictionary.

Pickling a

Context

produces a different output in order to have a common interchange format for the Python and C versions.

The order of arguments in the

Context

constructor has been changed to match the order displayed by

repr()

.

The watchexp parameter in the

quantize()

method is deprecated.

email

Policy Framework

The email package now has a

policy

framework. A

Policy

is an object with several methods and properties that control how the email package behaves. The primary policy for Python 3.3 is the

Compat32

policy, which provides backward compatibility with the email package in Python 3.2. A policy can be specified when an email message is parsed by a

parser

, or when a

Message

object is created, or when an email is serialized using a

generator

. Unless overridden, a policy passed to a parser is inherited by all the Message object and sub-objects created by the parser. By default a generator will use the policy of the Message object it is serializing. The default policy is

compat32

.

The minimum set of controls implemented by all policy objects are:

max_line_length

The maximum length, excluding the linesep character(s), individual lines may have when a Message is serialized. Defaults to 78.

linesep

The character used to separate individual lines when a Message is serialized. Defaults to \n.

cte_type

7bit or 8bit. 8bit applies only to a Bytesgenerator, and means that non-ASCII may be used where allowed by the protocol (or where it exists in the original input).

raise_on_defect

Causes a parser to raise error when defects are encountered instead of adding them to the Message object’s defects list.

A new policy instance, with new settings, is created using the

clone()

method of policy objects. clone takes any of the above controls as keyword arguments. Any control not specified in the call retains its default value. Thus you can create a policy that uses \r\n linesep characters like this:

mypolicy=compat32.clone(linesep='\r\n')Policies can be used to make the generation of messages in the format needed by your application simpler. Instead of having to remember to specify linesep='\r\n' in all the places you call a generator, you can specify it once, when you set the policy used by the parser or the Message, whichever your program uses to create Message objects. On the other hand, if you need to generate messages in multiple forms, you can still specify the parameters in the appropriate generator call. Or you can have custom policy instances for your different cases, and pass those in when you create the generator.

Other API Changes

New

BytesHeaderParser

, added to the

parser

module to complement

HeaderParser

and complete the Bytes API.

New utility functions:

format_datetime()

: given a

datetime

, produce a string formatted for use in an email header.

parsedate_to_datetime()

: given a date string from an email header, convert it into an aware

datetime

, or a naive datetime if the offset is -0000.

localtime()

: With no argument, returns the current local time as an aware

datetime

using the local

timezone

. Given an aware datetime, converts it into an aware datetime using the local timezone.

ftplib

ftplib.FTP

now accepts a source_address keyword argument to specify the (host,port) to use as the source address in the bind call when creating the outgoing socket. (Contributed by Giampaolo Rodolà in

bpo-8594

.)

The

FTP_TLS

class now provides a new

ccc()

function to revert control channel back to plaintext. This can be useful to take advantage of firewalls that know how to handle NAT with non-secure FTP without opening fixed ports. (Contributed by Giampaolo Rodolà in

bpo-12139

.)

Added

ftplib.FTP.mlsd()

method which provides a parsable directory listing format and deprecates

ftplib.FTP.nlst()

and

ftplib.FTP.dir()

. (Contributed by Giampaolo Rodolà in

bpo-11072

.)

functools

The

@functools.lru_cache

decorator now accepts a typed keyword argument (that defaults to False to ensure that it caches values of different types that compare equal in separate cache slots. (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger in

bpo-13227

.)

gc

It is now possible to register callbacks invoked by the garbage collector before and after collection using the new

callbacks

list.

hmac

A new

compare_digest()

function has been added to prevent side channel attacks on digests through timing analysis. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan and Christian Heimes in

bpo-15061

.)

http

http.server.BaseHTTPRequestHandler

now buffers the headers and writes them all at once when

end_headers()

is called. A new method

flush_headers()

can be used to directly manage when the accumulated headers are sent. (Contributed by Andrew Schaaf in

bpo-3709

.)

http.server

now produces valid HTML4.01strict output. (Contributed by Ezio Melotti in

bpo-13295

.)

http.client.HTTPResponse

now has a

readinto()

method, which means it can be used as an

io.RawIOBase

class. (Contributed by John Kuhn in

bpo-13464

.)

html

html.parser.HTMLParser

is now able to parse broken markup without raising errors, therefore the strict argument of the constructor and the HTMLParseError exception are now deprecated. The ability to parse broken markup is the result of a number of bug fixes that are also available on the latest bug fix releases of Python 2.7/3.2. (Contributed by Ezio Melotti in

bpo-15114

, and

bpo-14538

,

bpo-13993

,

bpo-13960

,

bpo-13358

,

bpo-1745761

,

bpo-755670

,

bpo-13357

,

bpo-12629

,

bpo-1200313

,

bpo-670664

,

bpo-13273

,

bpo-12888

,

bpo-7311

.)

A new

html5

dictionary that maps HTML5 named character references to the equivalent Unicode character(s) (e.g. html5['gt;']=='>') has been added to the

html.entities

module. The dictionary is now also used by

HTMLParser

. (Contributed by Ezio Melotti in

bpo-11113

and

bpo-15156

.)

imaplib

The

IMAP4_SSL

constructor now accepts an SSLContext parameter to control parameters of the secure channel.

(Contributed by Sijin Joseph in

bpo-8808

.)

inspect

A new

getclosurevars()

function has been added. This function reports the current binding of all names referenced from the function body and where those names were resolved, making it easier to verify correct internal state when testing code that relies on stateful closures.

(Contributed by Meador Inge and Nick Coghlan in

bpo-13062

.)

A new

getgeneratorlocals()

function has been added. This function reports the current binding of local variables in the generator’s stack frame, making it easier to verify correct internal state when testing generators.

(Contributed by Meador Inge in

bpo-15153

.)

io

The

open()

function has a new 'x' mode that can be used to exclusively create a new file, and raise a

FileExistsError

if the file already exists. It is based on the C11 ‘x’ mode to fopen().

(Contributed by David Townshend in

bpo-12760

.)

The constructor of the

TextIOWrapper

class has a new write_through optional argument. If write_through is True, calls to write() are guaranteed not to be buffered: any data written on the TextIOWrapper object is immediately handled to its underlying binary buffer.

itertools

accumulate()

now takes an optional func argument for providing a user-supplied binary function.

logging

The

basicConfig()

function now supports an optional handlers argument taking an iterable of handlers to be added to the root logger.

A class level attribute append_nul has been added to

SysLogHandler

to allow control of the appending of the NUL (\000) byte to syslog records, since for some daemons it is required while for others it is passed through to the log.

math

The

math

module has a new function,

log2()

, which returns the base-2 logarithm of x.

(Written by Mark Dickinson in

bpo-11888

.)

mmap

The

read()

method is now more compatible with other file-like objects: if the argument is omitted or specified as None, it returns the bytes from the current file position to the end of the mapping. (Contributed by Petri Lehtinen in

bpo-12021

.)

multiprocessing

The new

multiprocessing.connection.wait()

function allows polling multiple objects (such as connections, sockets and pipes) with a timeout. (Contributed by Richard Oudkerk in

bpo-12328

.)

multiprocessing.connection.Connection

objects can now be transferred over multiprocessing connections. (Contributed by Richard Oudkerk in

bpo-4892

.)

multiprocessing.Process

now accepts a daemon keyword argument to override the default behavior of inheriting the daemon flag from the parent process (

bpo-6064

).

New attribute

multiprocessing.Process.sentinel

allows a program to wait on multiple

Process

objects at one time using the appropriate OS primitives (for example,

select

on posix systems).

New methods

multiprocessing.pool.Pool.starmap()

and

starmap_async()

provide

itertools.starmap()

equivalents to the existing

multiprocessing.pool.Pool.map()

and

map_async()

functions. (Contributed by Hynek Schlawack in

bpo-12708

.)

nntplib

The nntplib.NNTP class now supports the context management protocol to unconditionally consume

socket.error

exceptions and to close the NNTP connection when done:

>>> fromnntplibimportNNTP>>> withNNTP('news.gmane.org')asn:... n.group('gmane.comp.python.committers')...('211 1755 1 1755 gmane.comp.python.committers', 1755, 1, 1755, 'gmane.comp.python.committers')>>>(Contributed by Giampaolo Rodolà in

bpo-9795

.)

os

The

os

module has a new

pipe2()

function that makes it possible to create a pipe with

O_CLOEXEC

or

O_NONBLOCK

flags set atomically. This is especially useful to avoid race conditions in multi-threaded programs.

The

os

module has a new

sendfile()

function which provides an efficient “zero-copy” way for copying data from one file (or socket) descriptor to another. The phrase “zero-copy” refers to the fact that all of the copying of data between the two descriptors is done entirely by the kernel, with no copying of data into userspace buffers. sendfile() can be used to efficiently copy data from a file on disk to a network socket, e.g. for downloading a file.

(Patch submitted by Ross Lagerwall and Giampaolo Rodolà in

bpo-10882

.)

To avoid race conditions like symlink attacks and issues with temporary files and directories, it is more reliable (and also faster) to manipulate file descriptors instead of file names. Python 3.3 enhances existing functions and introduces new functions to work on file descriptors (

bpo-4761

,

bpo-10755

and

bpo-14626

).

The

os

module has a new

fwalk()

function similar to

walk()

except that it also yields file descriptors referring to the directories visited. This is especially useful to avoid symlink races.

The following functions get new optional dir_fd (

paths relative to directory descriptors

) and/or follow_symlinks (

not following symlinks

):

access()

,

chflags()

,

chmod()

,

chown()

,

link()

,

lstat()

,

mkdir()

,

mkfifo()

,

mknod()

,

open()

,

readlink()

,

remove()

,

rename()

,

replace()

,

rmdir()

,

stat()

,

symlink()

,

unlink()

,

utime()

. Platform support for using these parameters can be checked via the sets

os.supports_dir_fd

and

os.supports_follow_symlinks

.

The following functions now support a file descriptor for their path argument:

chdir()

,

chmod()

,

chown()

,

execve()

,

listdir()

,

pathconf()

,

exists()

,

stat()

,

statvfs()

,

utime()

. Platform support for this can be checked via the

os.supports_fd

set.

access()

accepts an effective_ids keyword argument to turn on using the effective uid/gid rather than the real uid/gid in the access check. Platform support for this can be checked via the

supports_effective_ids

set.

The

os

module has two new functions:

getpriority()

and

setpriority()

. They can be used to get or set process niceness/priority in a fashion similar to

os.nice()

but extended to all processes instead of just the current one.

(Patch submitted by Giampaolo Rodolà in

bpo-10784

.)

The new

os.replace()

function allows cross-platform renaming of a file with overwriting the destination. With

os.rename()

, an existing destination file is overwritten under POSIX, but raises an error under Windows. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in

bpo-8828

.)

The stat family of functions (

stat()

,

fstat()

, and

lstat()

) now support reading a file’s timestamps with nanosecond precision. Symmetrically,

utime()

can now write file timestamps with nanosecond precision. (Contributed by Larry Hastings in

bpo-14127

.)

The new

os.get_terminal_size()

function queries the size of the terminal attached to a file descriptor. See also

shutil.get_terminal_size()

. (Contributed by Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek in

bpo-13609

.)

New functions to support Linux extended attributes (

bpo-12720

):

getxattr()

,

listxattr()

,

removexattr()

,

setxattr()

.

New interface to the scheduler. These functions control how a process is allocated CPU time by the operating system. New functions:

sched_get_priority_max()

,

sched_get_priority_min()

,

sched_getaffinity()

,

sched_getparam()

,

sched_getscheduler()

,

sched_rr_get_interval()

,

sched_setaffinity()

,

sched_setparam()

,

sched_setscheduler()

,

sched_yield()

,

New functions to control the file system:

posix_fadvise()

: Announces an intention to access data in a specific pattern thus allowing the kernel to make optimizations.

posix_fallocate()

: Ensures that enough disk space is allocated for a file.

sync()

: Force write of everything to disk.

Additional new posix functions:

lockf()

: Apply, test or remove a POSIX lock on an open file descriptor.

pread()

: Read from a file descriptor at an offset, the file offset remains unchanged.

pwrite()

: Write to a file descriptor from an offset, leaving the file offset unchanged.

readv()

: Read from a file descriptor into a number of writable buffers.

truncate()

: Truncate the file corresponding to path, so that it is at most length bytes in size.

waitid()

: Wait for the completion of one or more child processes.

writev()

: Write the contents of buffers to a file descriptor, where buffers is an arbitrary sequence of buffers.

getgrouplist()

(

bpo-9344

): Return list of group ids that specified user belongs to.

times()

and

uname()

: Return type changed from a tuple to a tuple-like object with named attributes.

Some platforms now support additional constants for the

lseek()

function, such as os.SEEK_HOLE and os.SEEK_DATA.

New constants

RTLD_LAZY

,

RTLD_NOW

,

RTLD_GLOBAL

,

RTLD_LOCAL

,

RTLD_NODELETE

,

RTLD_NOLOAD

, and

RTLD_DEEPBIND

are available on platforms that support them. These are for use with the

sys.setdlopenflags()

function, and supersede the similar constants defined in

ctypes

and DLFCN. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in

bpo-13226

.)

os.symlink()

now accepts (and ignores) the target_is_directory keyword argument on non-Windows platforms, to ease cross-platform support.

pdb

Tab-completion is now available not only for command names, but also their arguments. For example, for the break command, function and file names are completed.

(Contributed by Georg Brandl in

bpo-14210

)

pickle

pickle.Pickler

objects now have an optional

dispatch_table

attribute allowing per-pickler reduction functions to be set.

(Contributed by Richard Oudkerk in

bpo-14166

.)

pydoc

The Tk GUI and the serve() function have been removed from the

pydoc

module: pydoc-g and serve() have been deprecated in Python 3.2.

re

str

regular expressions now support \u and \U escapes.

(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in

bpo-3665

.)

sched

run()

now accepts a blocking parameter which when set to false makes the method execute the scheduled events due to expire soonest (if any) and then return immediately. This is useful in case you want to use the

scheduler

in non-blocking applications. (Contributed by Giampaolo Rodolà in

bpo-13449

.)

scheduler

class can now be safely used in multi-threaded environments. (Contributed by Josiah Carlson and Giampaolo Rodolà in

bpo-8684

.)

timefunc and delayfunct parameters of

scheduler

class constructor are now optional and defaults to

time.time()

and

time.sleep()

respectively. (Contributed by Chris Clark in

bpo-13245

.)

enter()

and

enterabs()

argument parameter is now optional. (Contributed by Chris Clark in

bpo-13245

.)

enter()

and

enterabs()

now accept a kwargs parameter. (Contributed by Chris Clark in

bpo-13245

.)

select

Solaris and derivative platforms have a new class

select.devpoll

for high performance asynchronous sockets via /dev/poll. (Contributed by Jesús Cea Avión in

bpo-6397

.)

shlex

The previously undocumented helper function quote from the pipes modules has been moved to the

shlex

module and documented.

quote()

properly escapes all characters in a string that might be otherwise given special meaning by the shell.

shutil

New functions:

disk_usage()

: provides total, used and free disk space statistics. (Contributed by Giampaolo Rodolà in

bpo-12442

.)

chown()

: allows one to change user and/or group of the given path also specifying the user/group names and not only their numeric ids. (Contributed by Sandro Tosi in

bpo-12191

.)

shutil.get_terminal_size()

: returns the size of the terminal window to which the interpreter is attached. (Contributed by Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek in

bpo-13609

.)

copy2()

and

copystat()

now preserve file timestamps with nanosecond precision on platforms that support it. They also preserve file “extended attributes” on Linux. (Contributed by Larry Hastings in

bpo-14127

and

bpo-15238

.)

Several functions now take an optional symlinks argument: when that parameter is true, symlinks aren’t dereferenced and the operation instead acts on the symlink itself (or creates one, if relevant). (Contributed by Hynek Schlawack in

bpo-12715

.)

When copying files to a different file system,

move()

now handles symlinks the way the posix mv command does, recreating the symlink rather than copying the target file contents. (Contributed by Jonathan Niehof in

bpo-9993

.) move() now also returns the dst argument as its result.

rmtree()

is now resistant to symlink attacks on platforms which support the new dir_fd parameter in

os.open()

and

os.unlink()

. (Contributed by Martin von Löwis and Hynek Schlawack in

bpo-4489

.)

signal

The

signal

module has new functions:

pthread_sigmask()

: fetch and/or change the signal mask of the calling thread (Contributed by Jean-Paul Calderone in

bpo-8407

);

pthread_kill()

: send a signal to a thread;

sigpending()

: examine pending functions;

sigwait()

: wait a signal;

sigwaitinfo()

: wait for a signal, returning detailed information about it;

sigtimedwait()

: like

sigwaitinfo()

but with a timeout.

The signal handler writes the signal number as a single byte instead of a nul byte into the wakeup file descriptor. So it is possible to wait more than one signal and know which signals were raised.

signal.signal()

and

signal.siginterrupt()

raise an OSError, instead of a RuntimeError: OSError has an errno attribute.

smtpd

The smtpd module now supports

RFC 5321

(extended SMTP) and

RFC 1870

(size extension). Per the standard, these extensions are enabled if and only if the client initiates the session with an EHLO command.

(Initial ELHO support by Alberto Trevino. Size extension by Juhana Jauhiainen. Substantial additional work on the patch contributed by Michele Orrù and Dan Boswell.

bpo-8739

)

smtplib

The

SMTP

,

SMTP_SSL

, and

LMTP

classes now accept a source_address keyword argument to specify the (host,port) to use as the source address in the bind call when creating the outgoing socket. (Contributed by Paulo Scardine in

bpo-11281

.)

SMTP

now supports the context management protocol, allowing an SMTP instance to be used in a with statement. (Contributed by Giampaolo Rodolà in

bpo-11289

.)

The

SMTP_SSL

constructor and the

starttls()

method now accept an SSLContext parameter to control parameters of the secure channel. (Contributed by Kasun Herath in

bpo-8809

.)

socket

The

socket

class now exposes additional methods to process ancillary data when supported by the underlying platform:

sendmsg()

recvmsg()

recvmsg_into()

(Contributed by David Watson in

bpo-6560

, based on an earlier patch by Heiko Wundram)

The

socket

class now supports the PF_CAN protocol family (

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socketcan

), on Linux (

https://lwn.net/Articles/253425

).

(Contributed by Matthias Fuchs, updated by Tiago Gonçalves in

bpo-10141

.)

The

socket

class now supports the PF_RDS protocol family (

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliable_Datagram_Sockets

and

https://oss.oracle.com/projects/rds

).

The

socket

class now supports the PF_SYSTEM protocol family on OS X. (Contributed by Michael Goderbauer in

bpo-13777

.)

New function

sethostname()

allows the hostname to be set on Unix systems if the calling process has sufficient privileges. (Contributed by Ross Lagerwall in

bpo-10866

.)

socketserver

BaseServer

now has an overridable method

service_actions()

that is called by the

serve_forever()

method in the service loop.

ForkingMixIn

now uses this to clean up zombie child processes. (Contributed by Justin Warkentin in

bpo-11109

.)

sqlite3

New

sqlite3.Connection

method

set_trace_callback()

can be used to capture a trace of all sql commands processed by sqlite. (Contributed by Torsten Landschoff in

bpo-11688

.)

ssl

The

ssl

module has two new random generation functions:

RAND_bytes()

: generate cryptographically strong pseudo-random bytes.

RAND_pseudo_bytes(): generate pseudo-random bytes.

(Contributed by Victor Stinner in

bpo-12049

.)

The

ssl

module now exposes a finer-grained exception hierarchy in order to make it easier to inspect the various kinds of errors. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in

bpo-11183

.)

load_cert_chain()

now accepts a password argument to be used if the private key is encrypted. (Contributed by Adam Simpkins in

bpo-12803

.)

Diffie-Hellman key exchange, both regular and Elliptic Curve-based, is now supported through the

load_dh_params()

and

set_ecdh_curve()

methods. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in

bpo-13626

and

bpo-13627

.)

SSL sockets have a new

get_channel_binding()

method allowing the implementation of certain authentication mechanisms such as SCRAM-SHA-1-PLUS. (Contributed by Jacek Konieczny in

bpo-12551

.)

You can query the SSL compression algorithm used by an SSL socket, thanks to its new

compression()

method. The new attribute

OP_NO_COMPRESSION

can be used to disable compression. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in

bpo-13634

.)

Support has been added for the Next Protocol Negotiation extension using the

ssl.SSLContext.set_npn_protocols()

method. (Contributed by Colin Marc in

bpo-14204

.)

SSL errors can now be introspected more easily thanks to

library

and

reason

attributes. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in

bpo-14837

.)

The

get_server_certificate()

function now supports IPv6. (Contributed by Charles-François Natali in

bpo-11811

.)

New attribute

OP_CIPHER_SERVER_PREFERENCE

allows setting SSLv3 server sockets to use the server’s cipher ordering preference rather than the client’s (

bpo-13635

).

stat

The undocumented tarfile.filemode function has been moved to

stat.filemode()

. It can be used to convert a file’s mode to a string of the form ‘-rwxrwxrwx’.

(Contributed by Giampaolo Rodolà in

bpo-14807

.)

struct

The

struct

module now supports ssize_t and size_t via the new codes n and N, respectively. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in

bpo-3163

.)

subprocess

Command strings can now be bytes objects on posix platforms. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in

bpo-8513

.)

A new constant

DEVNULL

allows suppressing output in a platform-independent fashion. (Contributed by Ross Lagerwall in

bpo-5870

.)

sys

The

sys

module has a new

thread_info

named tuple

holding information about the thread implementation (

bpo-11223

).

tarfile

tarfile

now supports lzma encoding via the

lzma

module. (Contributed by Lars Gustäbel in

bpo-5689

.)

tempfile

tempfile.SpooledTemporaryFile

's truncate() method now accepts a size parameter. (Contributed by Ryan Kelly in

bpo-9957

.)

textwrap

The

textwrap

module has a new

indent()

that makes it straightforward to add a common prefix to selected lines in a block of text (

bpo-13857

).

threading

threading.Condition

,

threading.Semaphore

,

threading.BoundedSemaphore

,

threading.Event

, and

threading.Timer

, all of which used to be factory functions returning a class instance, are now classes and may be subclassed. (Contributed by Éric Araujo in

bpo-10968

.)

The

threading.Thread

constructor now accepts a daemon keyword argument to override the default behavior of inheriting the daemon flag value from the parent thread (

bpo-6064

).

The formerly private function _thread.get_ident is now available as the public function

threading.get_ident()

. This eliminates several cases of direct access to the _thread module in the stdlib. Third party code that used _thread.get_ident should likewise be changed to use the new public interface.

time

The

PEP 418

added new functions to the

time

module:

get_clock_info()

: Get information on a clock.

monotonic()

: Monotonic clock (cannot go backward), not affected by system clock updates.

perf_counter()

: Performance counter with the highest available resolution to measure a short duration.

process_time()

: Sum of the system and user CPU time of the current process.

Other new functions:

clock_getres()

,

clock_gettime()

and

clock_settime()

functions with CLOCK_xxx constants. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in

bpo-10278

.)

To improve cross platform consistency,

sleep()

now raises a

ValueError

when passed a negative sleep value. Previously this was an error on posix, but produced an infinite sleep on Windows.

types

Add a new

types.MappingProxyType

class: Read-only proxy of a mapping. (

bpo-14386

)

The new functions

types.new_class()

and

types.prepare_class()

provide support for

PEP 3115

compliant dynamic type creation. (

bpo-14588

)

unittest

assertRaises()

,

assertRaisesRegex()

,

assertWarns()

, and

assertWarnsRegex()

now accept a keyword argument msg when used as context managers. (Contributed by Ezio Melotti and Winston Ewert in

bpo-10775

.)

unittest.TestCase.run()

now returns the

TestResult

object.

urllib

The

Request

class, now accepts a method argument used by

get_method()

to determine what HTTP method should be used. For example, this will send a 'HEAD' request:

>>> urlopen(Request('https://www.python.org',method='HEAD'))(

bpo-1673007

)

webbrowser

The

webbrowser

module supports more “browsers”: Google Chrome (named chrome, chromium, chrome-browser or chromium-browser depending on the version and operating system), and the generic launchers xdg-open, from the FreeDesktop.org project, and gvfs-open, which is the default URI handler for GNOME 3. (The former contributed by Arnaud Calmettes in

bpo-13620

, the latter by Matthias Klose in

bpo-14493

.)

xml.etree.ElementTree

The

xml.etree.ElementTree

module now imports its C accelerator by default; there is no longer a need to explicitly import xml.etree.cElementTree (this module stays for backwards compatibility, but is now deprecated). In addition, the iter family of methods of

Element

has been optimized (rewritten in C). The module’s documentation has also been greatly improved with added examples and a more detailed reference.

zlib

New attribute

zlib.Decompress.eof

makes it possible to distinguish between a properly formed compressed stream and an incomplete or truncated one. (Contributed by Nadeem Vawda in

bpo-12646

.)

New attribute

zlib.ZLIB_RUNTIME_VERSION

reports the version string of the underlying zlib library that is loaded at runtime. (Contributed by Torsten Landschoff in

bpo-12306

.)

Optimizations

Major performance enhancements have been added:

Thanks to

PEP 393

, some operations on Unicode strings have been optimized:

the memory footprint is divided by 2 to 4 depending on the text

encode an ASCII string to UTF-8 doesn’t need to encode characters anymore, the UTF-8 representation is shared with the ASCII representation

the UTF-8 encoder has been optimized

repeating a single ASCII letter and getting a substring of an ASCII string is 4 times faster

UTF-8 is now 2x to 4x faster. UTF-16 encoding is now up to 10x faster.

(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka,

bpo-14624

,

bpo-14738

and

bpo-15026

.)

Build and C API Changes

Changes to Python’s build process and to the C API include:

New

PEP 3118

related function:

PyMemoryView_FromMemory()

PEP 393

added new Unicode types, macros and functions:

High-level API:

PyUnicode_CopyCharacters()

PyUnicode_FindChar()

PyUnicode_GetLength()

,

PyUnicode_GET_LENGTH

PyUnicode_New()

PyUnicode_Substring()

PyUnicode_ReadChar()

,

PyUnicode_WriteChar()

Low-level API:

Py_UCS1

,

Py_UCS2

,

Py_UCS4

types

PyASCIIObject

and

PyCompactUnicodeObject

structures

PyUnicode_READY

PyUnicode_FromKindAndData()

PyUnicode_AsUCS4()

,

PyUnicode_AsUCS4Copy()

PyUnicode_DATA

,

PyUnicode_1BYTE_DATA

,

PyUnicode_2BYTE_DATA

,

PyUnicode_4BYTE_DATA

PyUnicode_KIND

with PyUnicode_Kind enum: PyUnicode_WCHAR_KIND,

PyUnicode_1BYTE_KIND

,

PyUnicode_2BYTE_KIND

,

PyUnicode_4BYTE_KIND

PyUnicode_READ

,

PyUnicode_READ_CHAR

,

PyUnicode_WRITE

PyUnicode_MAX_CHAR_VALUE

PyArg_ParseTuple

now accepts a

bytearray

for the c format (

bpo-12380

).

Deprecated

Unsupported Operating Systems

OS/2 and VMS are no longer supported due to the lack of a maintainer.

Windows 2000 and Windows platforms which set COMSPEC to command.com are no longer supported due to maintenance burden.

OSF support, which was deprecated in 3.2, has been completely removed.

Deprecated Python modules, functions and methods

Passing a non-empty string to object.__format__() is deprecated, and will produce a

TypeError

in Python 3.4 (

bpo-9856

).

The unicode_internal codec has been deprecated because of the

PEP 393

, use UTF-8, UTF-16 (utf-16-le or utf-16-be), or UTF-32 (utf-32-le or utf-32-be)

ftplib.FTP.nlst()

and

ftplib.FTP.dir()

: use

ftplib.FTP.mlsd()

platform.popen(): use the

subprocess

module. Check especially the

Replacing Older Functions with the subprocess Module

section (

bpo-11377

).

bpo-13374

: The Windows bytes API has been deprecated in the

os

module. Use Unicode filenames, instead of bytes filenames, to not depend on the ANSI code page anymore and to support any filename.

bpo-13988

: The xml.etree.cElementTree module is deprecated. The accelerator is used automatically whenever available.

The behaviour of time.clock() depends on the platform: use the new

time.perf_counter()

or

time.process_time()

function instead, depending on your requirements, to have a well defined behaviour.

The os.stat_float_times() function is deprecated.

abc

module:

@abc.abstractproperty

has been deprecated, use

@property

with

@abc.abstractmethod

instead.

@abc.abstractclassmethod

has been deprecated, use

@classmethod

with

@abc.abstractmethod

instead.

@abc.abstractstaticmethod

has been deprecated, use

@staticmethod

with

@abc.abstractmethod

instead.

importlib

package:

importlib.abc.SourceLoader.path_mtime()

is now deprecated in favour of

importlib.abc.SourceLoader.path_stats()

as bytecode files now store both the modification time and size of the source file the bytecode file was compiled from.

Deprecated functions and types of the C API

The

Py_UNICODE

has been deprecated by

PEP 393

and will be removed in Python 4. All functions using this type are deprecated:

Unicode functions and methods using

Py_UNICODE

and

Py_UNICODE

* types:

PyUnicode_FromUnicode: use

PyUnicode_FromWideChar()

or

PyUnicode_FromKindAndData()

PyUnicode_AS_UNICODE, PyUnicode_AsUnicode(), PyUnicode_AsUnicodeAndSize(): use

PyUnicode_AsWideCharString()

PyUnicode_AS_DATA: use

PyUnicode_DATA

with

PyUnicode_READ

and

PyUnicode_WRITE

PyUnicode_GET_SIZE, PyUnicode_GetSize(): use

PyUnicode_GET_LENGTH

or

PyUnicode_GetLength()

PyUnicode_GET_DATA_SIZE: use PyUnicode_GET_LENGTH(str)*PyUnicode_KIND(str) (only work on ready strings)

PyUnicode_AsUnicodeCopy(): use

PyUnicode_AsUCS4Copy()

or

PyUnicode_AsWideCharString()

PyUnicode_GetMax()

Functions and macros manipulating Py_UNICODE* strings:

Py_UNICODE_strlen(): use

PyUnicode_GetLength()

or

PyUnicode_GET_LENGTH

Py_UNICODE_strcat(): use

PyUnicode_CopyCharacters()

or

PyUnicode_FromFormat()

Py_UNICODE_strcpy(), Py_UNICODE_strncpy(), Py_UNICODE_COPY(): use

PyUnicode_CopyCharacters()

or

PyUnicode_Substring()

Py_UNICODE_strcmp(): use

PyUnicode_Compare()

Py_UNICODE_strncmp(): use

PyUnicode_Tailmatch()

Py_UNICODE_strchr(), Py_UNICODE_strrchr(): use

PyUnicode_FindChar()

Py_UNICODE_FILL(): use

PyUnicode_Fill()

Py_UNICODE_MATCH

Encoders:

PyUnicode_Encode(): use PyUnicode_AsEncodedObject()

PyUnicode_EncodeUTF7()

PyUnicode_EncodeUTF8(): use

PyUnicode_AsUTF8()

or

PyUnicode_AsUTF8String()

PyUnicode_EncodeUTF32()

PyUnicode_EncodeUTF16()

PyUnicode_EncodeUnicodeEscape() use

PyUnicode_AsUnicodeEscapeString()

PyUnicode_EncodeRawUnicodeEscape() use

PyUnicode_AsRawUnicodeEscapeString()

PyUnicode_EncodeLatin1(): use

PyUnicode_AsLatin1String()

PyUnicode_EncodeASCII(): use

PyUnicode_AsASCIIString()

PyUnicode_EncodeCharmap()

PyUnicode_TranslateCharmap()

PyUnicode_EncodeMBCS(): use

PyUnicode_AsMBCSString()

or

PyUnicode_EncodeCodePage()

(with CP_ACP code_page)

PyUnicode_EncodeDecimal(), PyUnicode_TransformDecimalToASCII()

Deprecated features

The

array

module’s 'u' format code is now deprecated and will be removed in Python 4 together with the rest of the (

Py_UNICODE

) API.

Porting to Python 3.3

This section lists previously described changes and other bugfixes that may require changes to your code.

Porting Python code

Hash randomization is enabled by default. Set the

PYTHONHASHSEED

environment variable to 0 to disable hash randomization. See also the

object.__hash__()

method.

bpo-12326

: On Linux, sys.platform doesn’t contain the major version anymore. It is now always ‘linux’, instead of ‘linux2’ or ‘linux3’ depending on the Linux version used to build Python. Replace sys.platform == ‘linux2’ with sys.platform.startswith(‘linux’), or directly sys.platform == ‘linux’ if you don’t need to support older Python versions.

bpo-13847

,

bpo-14180

:

time

and

datetime

:

OverflowError

is now raised instead of

ValueError

if a timestamp is out of range.

OSError

is now raised if C functions gmtime() or localtime() failed.

The default finders used by import now utilize a cache of what is contained within a specific directory. If you create a Python source file or sourceless bytecode file, make sure to call

importlib.invalidate_caches()

to clear out the cache for the finders to notice the new file.

ImportError

now uses the full name of the module that was attempted to be imported. Doctests that check ImportErrors’ message will need to be updated to use the full name of the module instead of just the tail of the name.

The index argument to

__import__()

now defaults to 0 instead of -1 and no longer support negative values. It was an oversight when

PEP 328

was implemented that the default value remained -1. If you need to continue to perform a relative import followed by an absolute import, then perform the relative import using an index of 1, followed by another import using an index of 0. It is preferred, though, that you use

importlib.import_module()

rather than call __import__() directly.

__import__()

no longer allows one to use an index value other than 0 for top-level modules. E.g. __import__('sys',level=1) is now an error.

Because

sys.meta_path

and

sys.path_hooks

now have finders on them by default, you will most likely want to use

list.insert()

instead of

list.append()

to add to those lists.

Because None is now inserted into

sys.path_importer_cache

, if you are clearing out entries in the dictionary of paths that do not have a finder, you will need to remove keys paired with values of Noneandimp.NullImporter to be backwards-compatible. This will lead to extra overhead on older versions of Python that re-insert None into sys.path_importer_cache where it represents the use of implicit finders, but semantically it should not change anything.

importlib.abc.Finder no longer specifies a find_module() abstract method that must be implemented. If you were relying on subclasses to implement that method, make sure to check for the method’s existence first. You will probably want to check for find_loader() first, though, in the case of working with

path entry finders

.

pkgutil

has been converted to use

importlib

internally. This eliminates many edge cases where the old behaviour of the

PEP 302

import emulation failed to match the behaviour of the real import system. The import emulation itself is still present, but is now deprecated. The

pkgutil.iter_importers()

and

pkgutil.walk_packages()

functions special case the standard import hooks so they are still supported even though they do not provide the non-standard iter_modules() method.

A longstanding RFC-compliance bug (

bpo-1079

) in the parsing done by

email.header.decode_header()

has been fixed. Code that uses the standard idiom to convert encoded headers into unicode (str(make_header(decode_header(h))) will see no change, but code that looks at the individual tuples returned by decode_header will see that whitespace that precedes or follows ASCII sections is now included in the ASCII section. Code that builds headers using make_header should also continue to work without change, since make_header continues to add whitespace between ASCII and non-ASCII sections if it is not already present in the input strings.

email.utils.formataddr()

now does the correct content transfer encoding when passed non-ASCII display names. Any code that depended on the previous buggy behavior that preserved the non-ASCII unicode in the formatted output string will need to be changed (

bpo-1690608

).

poplib.POP3.quit()

may now raise protocol errors like all other poplib methods. Code that assumes quit does not raise

poplib.error_proto

errors may need to be changed if errors on quit are encountered by a particular application (

bpo-11291

).

The strict argument to

email.parser.Parser

, deprecated since Python 2.4, has finally been removed.

The deprecated method unittest.TestCase.assertSameElements has been removed.

The deprecated variable time.accept2dyear has been removed.

The deprecated Context._clamp attribute has been removed from the

decimal

module. It was previously replaced by the public attribute

clamp

. (See

bpo-8540

.)

The undocumented internal helper class SSLFakeFile has been removed from

smtplib

, since its functionality has long been provided directly by

socket.socket.makefile()

.

Passing a negative value to

time.sleep()

on Windows now raises an error instead of sleeping forever. It has always raised an error on posix.

The ast.__version__ constant has been removed. If you need to make decisions affected by the AST version, use

sys.version_info

to make the decision.

Code that used to work around the fact that the

threading

module used factory functions by subclassing the private classes will need to change to subclass the now-public classes.

The undocumented debugging machinery in the threading module has been removed, simplifying the code. This should have no effect on production code, but is mentioned here in case any application debug frameworks were interacting with it (

bpo-13550

).

Porting C code

In the course of changes to the buffer API the undocumented smalltable member of the

Py_buffer

structure has been removed and the layout of the PyMemoryViewObject has changed.

All extensions relying on the relevant parts in memoryobject.h or object.h must be rebuilt.

Due to

PEP 393

, the

Py_UNICODE

type and all functions using this type are deprecated (but will stay available for at least five years). If you were using low-level Unicode APIs to construct and access unicode objects and you want to benefit of the memory footprint reduction provided by

PEP 393

, you have to convert your code to the new

Unicode API

.

However, if you only have been using high-level functions such as

PyUnicode_Concat()

,

PyUnicode_Join()

or

PyUnicode_FromFormat()

, your code will automatically take advantage of the new unicode representations.

PyImport_GetMagicNumber()

now returns -1 upon failure.

As a negative value for the level argument to

__import__()

is no longer valid, the same now holds for

PyImport_ImportModuleLevel()

. This also means that the value of level used by

PyImport_ImportModuleEx()

is now 0 instead of -1.

Building C extensions

The range of possible file names for C extensions has been narrowed. Very rarely used spellings have been suppressed: under POSIX, files named xxxmodule.so, xxxmodule.abi3.so and xxxmodule.cpython-*.so are no longer recognized as implementing the xxx module. If you had been generating such files, you have to switch to the other spellings (i.e., remove the module string from the file names).

(implemented in

bpo-14040

.)

Command Line Switch Changes

The -Q command-line flag and related artifacts have been removed. Code checking sys.flags.division_warning will need updating.

(

bpo-10998

, contributed by Éric Araujo.)

When python is started with

-S

, importsite will no longer add site-specific paths to the module search paths. In previous versions, it did.

(

bpo-11591

, contributed by Carl Meyer with editions by Éric Araujo.)