Erlang Term and Codec for Python

This project is a part of http://github.com/Pyrlang/Pyrlang but does not depend on it and can be used separately.

The Term library adds support classes to represent Erlang terms in Python and implements a codec for encoding and decoding data in Erlang External Term Format (abbreviated ETF) written in Python and a native and (most likely) safe Python extension written in Rust.

The extension or Python implementation is selected automatically when you import term.codec and all API is available via term.codec module. If native extension was not found, a warning will be logged and the Python implementation will be used.

Installing

If you just run

pip install pyrlang-term

The pure python version will be installed unless there exists a pre built binary.

If you want to build the native one, you'll need rust and a few more packages.

To install rust (from https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install):

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

Then install the build requirements before installing pyrlang-term:

pip install setuptools-rust semantic_version
pip install pyrlang-term

Atoms

The native representation of atoms are found in term.atom. There are Two classes, Atom and StrictAtom. Atom is the default, it will become an atom when converting back to etf, however it evaluates as string so it's possible to use a map with atom keys as keyword argument.

The drawback of this is if you may have a map with both atoms and string /binaries with the same content

#{foo => <<"atom">>, "foo" => <<"list">>}

Then you'll get

In [1]: from term import codec

In [2]: data = bytes([131,116,0, ...])

In [3]: codec.binary_to_term(data)
Out[3]: ({Atom('foo'): b'list'}, b'')

To allow for this we've added another atom type StrictAtom that will give you:

In [4]: codec.binary_to_term(data, {'atom': "StrictAtom"})
Out[4]: ({StrictAtom('foo'): b'atom', 'foo': b'list'}, b'')

Still StrictAtom('foo') == 'foo' so it you need something different still, you can put in your custom atom class

In [5]: class A:
   ...:     def __init__(self, s):
   ...:         self._s = s
   ...:     def __repr__(self):
   ...:         return 'A({})'.format(self._s)
   ...:

In [6]: codec.binary_to_term(data, {'atom_call': A})
Out[6]: ({A(foo): b'atom', 'foo': b'list'}, b'')

The 'atom_call' option takes any callable that takes a string as input, and the return value will be used for the atom representation. Only Atom and StrictAtom can be natively parsed back to atom when decoded. If you roll your own, make sure to use encode_hook when encoding.

More Documentation

Here: https://pyrlang.github.io/Term/