PEP 492 - Coroutines with async and await syntax

PEP 492 greatly improves support for asynchronous programming in Python by adding awaitable objects, coroutine functions, asynchronous iteration, and asynchronous context managers.

Coroutine functions are declared using the new async def syntax:

>>> async def coro():
...     return 'spam'

Inside a coroutine function, the new await expression can be used to suspend coroutine execution until the result is available. Any object can be awaited, as long as it implements the awaitable protocol by defining the __await__() method.

PEP 492 also adds async for statement for convenient iteration over asynchronous iterables.

An example of a rudimentary HTTP client written using the new syntax:

import asyncio

async def http_get(domain):
    reader, writer = await asyncio.open_connection(domain, 80)

    writer.write(b'\r\n'.join([
        b'GET / HTTP/1.1',
        b'Host: %b' % domain.encode('latin-1'),
        b'Connection: close',
        b'', b''
    ]))

    async for line in reader:
        print('>>>', line)

    writer.close()

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
try:
    loop.run_until_complete(http_get('example.com'))
finally:
    loop.close()

Similarly to asynchronous iteration, there is a new syntax for asynchronous context managers. The following script:

import asyncio

async def coro(name, lock):
    print('coro {}: waiting for lock'.format(name))
    async with lock:
        print('coro {}: holding the lock'.format(name))
        await asyncio.sleep(1)
        print('coro {}: releasing the lock'.format(name))

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
lock = asyncio.Lock()
coros = asyncio.gather(coro(1, lock), coro(2, lock))
try:
    loop.run_until_complete(coros)
finally:
    loop.close()

will output:

coro 2: waiting for lock
coro 2: holding the lock
coro 1: waiting for lock
coro 2: releasing the lock
coro 1: holding the lock
coro 1: releasing the lock

Note that both async for and async with can only be used inside a coroutine function declared with async def.

Coroutine functions are intended to be run inside a compatible event loop, such as the asyncio loop.

PEP 465 - A dedicated infix operator for matrix multiplication

PEP 465 adds the @ infix operator for matrix multiplication. Currently, no builtin Python types implement the new operator, however, it can be implemented by defining __matmul__(), __rmatmul__(), and __imatmul__() for regular, reflected, and in-place matrix multiplication. The semantics of these methods is similar to that of methods defining other infix arithmetic operators.

Matrix multiplication is a notably common operation in many fields of mathematics, science, engineering, and the addition of @ allows writing cleaner code:

S = (H @ beta - r).T @ inv(H @ V @ H.T) @ (H @ beta - r)

instead of:

S = dot((dot(H, beta) - r).T,
        dot(inv(dot(dot(H, V), H.T)), dot(H, beta) - r))

NumPy 1.10 has support for the new operator:

>>> import numpy

>>> x = numpy.ones(3)
>>> x
array([ 1., 1., 1.])

>>> m = numpy.eye(3)
>>> m
array([[ 1., 0., 0.],
       [ 0., 1., 0.],
       [ 0., 0., 1.]])

>>> x @ m
array([ 1., 1., 1.])

PEP 448 - Additional Unpacking Generalizations

PEP 448 extends the allowed uses of the * iterable unpacking operator and ** dictionary unpacking operator. It is now possible to use an arbitrary number of unpackings in function calls:

>>> print(*[1], *[2], 3, *[4, 5])
1 2 3 4 5

>>> def fn(a, b, c, d):
...     print(a, b, c, d)
...

>>> fn(**{'a': 1, 'c': 3}, **{'b': 2, 'd': 4})
1 2 3 4

Similarly, tuple, list, set, and dictionary displays allow multiple unpackings (see Expression lists and Dictionary displays):

>>> *range(4), 4
(0, 1, 2, 3, 4)

>>> [*range(4), 4]
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4]

>>> {*range(4), 4, *(5, 6, 7)}
{0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}

>>> {'x': 1, **{'y': 2}}
{'x': 1, 'y': 2}

PEP 461 - percent formatting support for bytes and bytearray

PEP 461 adds support for the % interpolation operator to bytes and bytearray.

While interpolation is usually thought of as a string operation, there are cases where interpolation on bytes or bytearrays makes sense, and the work needed to make up for this missing functionality detracts from the overall readability of the code. This issue is particularly important when dealing with wire format protocols, which are often a mixture of binary and ASCII compatible text.

Examples:

>>> b'Hello %b!' % b'World'
b'Hello World!'

>>> b'x=%i y=%f' % (1, 2.5)
b'x=1 y=2.500000'

Unicode is not allowed for %b, but it is accepted by %a (equivalent of repr(obj).encode('ascii', 'backslashreplace')):

>>> b'Hello %b!' % 'World'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: %b requires bytes, or an object that implements __bytes__, not 'str'

>>> b'price: %a' % '10€'
b"price: '10\\u20ac'"

Note that %s and %r conversion types, although supported, should only be used in codebases that need compatibility with Python 2.

PEP 484 - Type Hints

Function annotation syntax has been a Python feature since version 3.0 (PEP 3107 ), however the semantics of annotations has been left undefined.

Experience has shown that the majority of function annotation uses were to provide type hints to function parameters and return values. It became evident that it would be beneficial for Python users, if the standard library included the base definitions and tools for type annotations.

PEP 484 introduces a provisional module to provide these standard definitions and tools, along with some conventions for situations where annotations are not available.

For example, here is a simple function whose argument and return type are declared in the annotations:

def greeting(name: str) -> str:
    return 'Hello ' + name

While these annotations are available at runtime through the usual __annotations__ attribute, no automatic type checking happens at runtime. Instead, it is assumed that a separate off-line type checker (e.g. mypy ) will be used for on-demand source code analysis.

The type system supports unions, generic types, and a special type named Any which is consistent with (i.e. assignable to and from) all types.

PEP 471 - os.scandir() function – a better and faster directory iterator

PEP 471 adds a new directory iteration function, os.scandir(), to the standard library. Additionally, os.walk() is now implemented using scandir, which makes it 3 to 5 times faster on POSIX systems and 7 to 20 times faster on Windows systems. This is largely achieved by greatly reducing the number of calls to os.stat() required to walk a directory tree.

Additionally, scandir returns an iterator, as opposed to returning a list of file names, which improves memory efficiency when iterating over very large directories.

The following example shows a simple use of os.scandir() to display all the files (excluding directories) in the given path that don’t start with '.'. The entry.is_file() call will generally not make an additional system call:

for entry in os.scandir(path):
    if not entry.name.startswith('.') and entry.is_file():
        print(entry.name)

PEP 475: Retry system calls failing with EINTR

An errno.EINTR error code is returned whenever a system call, that is waiting for I/O, is interrupted by a signal. Previously, Python would raise InterruptedError in such cases. This meant that, when writing a Python application, the developer had two choices:

1. Ignore the InterruptedError.

2. Handle the InterruptedError and attempt to restart the interrupted system call at every call site.

The first option makes an application fail intermittently. The second option adds a large amount of boilerplate that makes the code nearly unreadable. Compare:

print("Hello World")

and:

while True:
    try:
        print("Hello World")
        break
    except InterruptedError:
        continue

PEP 475 implements automatic retry of system calls on EINTR. This removes the burden of dealing with EINTR or InterruptedError in user code in most situations and makes Python programs, including the standard library, more robust. Note that the system call is only retried if the signal handler does not raise an exception.

Below is a list of functions which are now retried when interrupted by a signal:

• open() and io.open();

• functions of the faulthandler module;

• os functions: fchdir(), fchmod(), fchown(), fdatasync(), fstat(), fstatvfs(), fsync(), ftruncate(), mkfifo(), mknod(), open(), posix_fadvise(), posix_fallocate(), pread(), pwrite(), read(), readv(), sendfile(), wait3(), wait4(), wait(), waitid(), waitpid(), write(), writev();

• special cases: os.close() and os.dup2() now ignore EINTR errors; the syscall is not retried (see the PEP for the rationale);

• select functions: devpoll.poll(), epoll.poll(), kqueue.control(), poll.poll(), select();

• methods of the socket class: accept(), connect() (except for non-blocking sockets), recv(), recvfrom(), recvmsg(), send(), sendall(), sendmsg(), sendto();

• signal.sigtimedwait() and signal.sigwaitinfo();

• time.sleep().

PEP 479: Change StopIteration handling inside generators

The interaction of generators and StopIteration in Python 3.4 and earlier was sometimes surprising, and could conceal obscure bugs. Previously, StopIteration raised accidentally inside a generator function was interpreted as the end of the iteration by the loop construct driving the generator.

PEP 479 changes the behavior of generators: when a StopIteration exception is raised inside a generator, it is replaced with a RuntimeError before it exits the generator frame. The main goal of this change is to ease debugging in the situation where an unguarded next() call raises StopIteration and causes the iteration controlled by the generator to terminate silently. This is particularly pernicious in combination with the yield from construct.

This is a backwards incompatible change, so to enable the new behavior, a __future__ import is necessary:

>>> from __future__ import generator_stop

>>> def gen():
...     next(iter([]))
...     yield
...
>>> next(gen())
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 2, in gen
StopIteration

The above exception was the direct cause of the following exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
RuntimeError: generator raised StopIteration

Without a __future__ import, a PendingDeprecationWarning will be raised whenever a StopIteration exception is raised inside a generator.

PEP 485: A function for testing approximate equality

PEP 485 adds the math.isclose() and cmath.isclose() functions which tell whether two values are approximately equal or “close” to each other. Whether or not two values are considered close is determined according to given absolute and relative tolerances. Relative tolerance is the maximum allowed difference between isclose arguments, relative to the larger absolute value:

>>> import math
>>> a = 5.0
>>> b = 4.99998
>>> math.isclose(a, b, rel_tol=1e-5)
True
>>> math.isclose(a, b, rel_tol=1e-6)
False

It is also possible to compare two values using absolute tolerance, which must be a non-negative value:

>>> import math
>>> a = 5.0
>>> b = 4.99998
>>> math.isclose(a, b, abs_tol=0.00003)
True
>>> math.isclose(a, b, abs_tol=0.00001)
False

PEP 486: Make the Python Launcher aware of virtual environments

PEP 486 makes the Windows launcher (see PEP 397 ) aware of an active virtual environment. When the default interpreter would be used and the VIRTUAL_ENV environment variable is set, the interpreter in the virtual environment will be used.

PEP 488: Elimination of PYO files

PEP 488 does away with the concept of .pyo files. This means that .pyc files represent both unoptimized and optimized bytecode. To prevent the need to constantly regenerate bytecode files, .pyc files now have an optional opt- tag in their name when the bytecode is optimized. This has the side-effect of no more bytecode file name clashes when running under either -O or -OO. Consequently, bytecode files generated from -O, and -OO may now exist simultaneously. importlib.util.cache_from_source() has an updated API to help with this change.

PEP 489: Multi-phase extension module initialization

PEP 489 updates extension module initialization to take advantage of the two step module loading mechanism introduced by PEP 451 in Python 3.4.

This change brings the import semantics of extension modules that opt-in to using the new mechanism much closer to those of Python source and bytecode modules, including the ability to use any valid identifier as a module name, rather than being restricted to ASCII.

typing

The new typing provisional module provides standard definitions and tools for function type annotations. See Type Hints for more information.

zipapp

The new zipapp module (specified in PEP 441 ) provides an API and command line tool for creating executable Python Zip Applications, which were introduced in Python 2.6 in bpo-1739468 , but which were not well publicized, either at the time or since.

With the new module, bundling your application is as simple as putting all the files, including a __main__.py file, into a directory myapp and running:

$ python -m zipapp myapp
$ python myapp.pyz

The module implementation has been contributed by Paul Moore in bpo-23491 .

argparse

The ArgumentParser class now allows disabling abbreviated usage of long options by setting allow_abbrev to False. (Contributed by Jonathan Paugh, Steven Bethard, paul j3 and Daniel Eriksson in bpo-14910 .)

asyncio

Since the asyncio module is provisional, all changes introduced in Python 3.5 have also been backported to Python 3.4.x.

Notable changes in the asyncio module since Python 3.4.0:

• New debugging APIs: loop.set_debug() and loop.get_debug() methods. (Contributed by Victor Stinner.)

• The proactor event loop now supports SSL. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou and Victor Stinner in bpo-22560 .)

• A new loop.is_closed() method to check if the event loop is closed. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-21326 .)

• A new loop.create_task() to conveniently create and schedule a new Task for a coroutine. The create_task method is also used by all asyncio functions that wrap coroutines into tasks, such as asyncio.wait(), asyncio.gather(), etc. (Contributed by Victor Stinner.)

• A new transport.get_write_buffer_limits() method to inquire for high- and low- water limits of the flow control. (Contributed by Victor Stinner.)

• The async() function is deprecated in favor of ensure_future(). (Contributed by Yury Selivanov.)

• New loop.set_task_factory() and loop.get_task_factory() methods to customize the task factory that loop.create_task() method uses. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov.)

• New Queue.join() and Queue.task_done() queue methods. (Contributed by Victor Stinner.)

• The JoinableQueue class was removed, in favor of the asyncio.Queue class. (Contributed by Victor Stinner.)

Updates in 3.5.1:

• The ensure_future() function and all functions that use it, such as loop.run_until_complete(), now accept all kinds of awaitable objects. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov.)

• New run_coroutine_threadsafe() function to submit coroutines to event loops from other threads. (Contributed by Vincent Michel.)

• New Transport.is_closing() method to check if the transport is closing or closed. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov.)

• The loop.create_server() method can now accept a list of hosts. (Contributed by Yann Sionneau.)

Updates in 3.5.2:

• New loop.create_future() method to create Future objects. This allows alternative event loop implementations, such as uvloop , to provide a faster asyncio.Future implementation. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov.)

• New loop.get_exception_handler() method to get the current exception handler. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov.)

• New StreamReader.readuntil() method to read data from the stream until a separator bytes sequence appears. (Contributed by Mark Korenberg.)

• The loop.create_connection() and loop.create_server() methods are optimized to avoid calling the system getaddrinfo function if the address is already resolved. (Contributed by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis.)

• The loop.sock_connect(sock, address) no longer requires the address to be resolved prior to the call. (Contributed by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis.)

bz2

The BZ2Decompressor.decompress method now accepts an optional max_length argument to limit the maximum size of decompressed data. (Contributed by Nikolaus Rath in bpo-15955 .)

cgi

The FieldStorage class now supports the context manager protocol. (Contributed by Berker Peksag in bpo-20289 .)

cmath

A new function isclose() provides a way to test for approximate equality. (Contributed by Chris Barker and Tal Einat in bpo-24270 .)

code

The InteractiveInterpreter.showtraceback() method now prints the full chained traceback, just like the interactive interpreter. (Contributed by Claudiu Popa in bpo-17442 .)

collections

The OrderedDict class is now implemented in C, which makes it 4 to 100 times faster. (Contributed by Eric Snow in bpo-16991 .)

OrderedDict.items(), OrderedDict.keys(), OrderedDict.values() views now support reversed() iteration. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-19505 .)

The deque class now defines index(), insert(), and copy(), and supports the + and * operators. This allows deques to be recognized as a MutableSequence and improves their substitutability for lists. (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger in bpo-23704 .)

Docstrings produced by namedtuple() can now be updated:

Point = namedtuple('Point', ['x', 'y'])
Point.__doc__ += ': Cartesian coodinate'
Point.x.__doc__ = 'abscissa'
Point.y.__doc__ = 'ordinate'

(Contributed by Berker Peksag in bpo-24064 .)

The UserString class now implements the __getnewargs__(), __rmod__(), casefold(), format_map(), isprintable(), and maketrans() methods to match the corresponding methods of str. (Contributed by Joe Jevnik in bpo-22189 .)

collections.abc

The Sequence.index() method now accepts start and stop arguments to match the corresponding methods of tuple, list, etc. (Contributed by Devin Jeanpierre in bpo-23086 .)

A new Generator abstract base class. (Contributed by Stefan Behnel in bpo-24018 .)

New Awaitable, Coroutine, AsyncIterator, and AsyncIterable abstract base classes. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-24184 .)

For earlier Python versions, a backport of the new ABCs is available in an external PyPI package .

compileall

A new compileall option, -j N, allows running N workers simultaneously to perform parallel bytecode compilation. The compile_dir() function has a corresponding workers parameter. (Contributed by Claudiu Popa in bpo-16104 .)

Another new option, -r, allows controlling the maximum recursion level for subdirectories. (Contributed by Claudiu Popa in bpo-19628 .)

The -q command line option can now be specified more than once, in which case all output, including errors, will be suppressed. The corresponding quiet parameter in compile_dir(), compile_file(), and compile_path() can now accept an integer value indicating the level of output suppression. (Contributed by Thomas Kluyver in bpo-21338 .)

concurrent.futures

The Executor.map() method now accepts a chunksize argument to allow batching of tasks to improve performance when ProcessPoolExecutor() is used. (Contributed by Dan O’Reilly in bpo-11271 .)

The number of workers in the ThreadPoolExecutor constructor is optional now. The default value is 5 times the number of CPUs. (Contributed by Claudiu Popa in bpo-21527 .)

configparser

configparser now provides a way to customize the conversion of values by specifying a dictionary of converters in the ConfigParser constructor, or by defining them as methods in ConfigParser subclasses. Converters defined in a parser instance are inherited by its section proxies.

Example:

>>> import configparser
>>> conv = {}
>>> conv['list'] = lambda v: [e.strip() for e in v.split() if e.strip()]
>>> cfg = configparser.ConfigParser(converters=conv)
>>> cfg.read_string("""
... [s]
... list = a b c d e f g
... """)
>>> cfg.get('s', 'list')
'a b c d e f g'
>>> cfg.getlist('s', 'list')
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g']
>>> section = cfg['s']
>>> section.getlist('list')
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g']

(Contributed by Łukasz Langa in bpo-18159 .)

contextlib

The new redirect_stderr() context manager (similar to redirect_stdout()) makes it easier for utility scripts to handle inflexible APIs that write their output to sys.stderr and don’t provide any options to redirect it:

>>> import contextlib, io, logging
>>> f = io.StringIO()
>>> with contextlib.redirect_stderr(f):
...     logging.warning('warning')
...
>>> f.getvalue()
'WARNING:root:warning\n'

(Contributed by Berker Peksag in bpo-22389 .)

csv

The writerow() method now supports arbitrary iterables, not just sequences. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-23171 .)

curses

The new update_lines_cols() function updates the LINES and COLS environment variables. This is useful for detecting manual screen resizing. (Contributed by Arnon Yaari in bpo-4254 .)

dbm

dumb.open always creates a new database when the flag has the value "n". (Contributed by Claudiu Popa in bpo-18039 .)

difflib

The charset of HTML documents generated by HtmlDiff.make_file() can now be customized by using a new charset keyword-only argument. The default charset of HTML document changed from "ISO-8859-1" to "utf-8". (Contributed by Berker Peksag in bpo-2052 .)

The diff_bytes() function can now compare lists of byte strings. This fixes a regression from Python 2. (Contributed by Terry J. Reedy and Greg Ward in bpo-17445 .)

distutils

Both the build and build_ext commands now accept a -j option to enable parallel building of extension modules. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in bpo-5309 .)

The distutils module now supports xz compression, and can be enabled by passing xztar as an argument to bdist --format. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-16314 .)

doctest

The DocTestSuite() function returns an empty unittest.TestSuite if module contains no docstrings, instead of raising ValueError. (Contributed by Glenn Jones in bpo-15916 .)

email

A new policy option Policy.mangle_from_ controls whether or not lines that start with "From " in email bodies are prefixed with a ">" character by generators. The default is True for compat32 and False for all other policies. (Contributed by Milan Oberkirch in bpo-20098 .)

A new Message.get_content_disposition() method provides easy access to a canonical value for the Content-Disposition header. (Contributed by Abhilash Raj in bpo-21083 .)

A new policy option EmailPolicy.utf8 can be set to True to encode email headers using the UTF-8 charset instead of using encoded words. This allows Messages to be formatted according to RFC 6532 and used with an SMTP server that supports the RFC 6531 SMTPUTF8 extension. (Contributed by R. David Murray in bpo-24211 .)

The mime.text.MIMEText constructor now accepts a charset.Charset instance. (Contributed by Claude Paroz and Berker Peksag in bpo-16324 .)

enum

The Enum callable has a new parameter start to specify the initial number of enum values if only names are provided:

>>> Animal = enum.Enum('Animal', 'cat dog', start=10)
>>> Animal.cat
<Animal.cat: 10>
>>> Animal.dog
<Animal.dog: 11>

(Contributed by Ethan Furman in bpo-21706 .)

faulthandler

The enable(), register(), dump_traceback() and dump_traceback_later() functions now accept file descriptors in addition to file-like objects. (Contributed by Wei Wu in bpo-23566 .)

functools

Most of the lru_cache() machinery is now implemented in C, making it significantly faster. (Contributed by Matt Joiner, Alexey Kachayev, and Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-14373 .)

glob

The iglob() and glob() functions now support recursive search in subdirectories, using the "**" pattern. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-13968 .)

gzip

The mode argument of the GzipFile constructor now accepts "x" to request exclusive creation. (Contributed by Tim Heaney in bpo-19222 .)

heapq

Element comparison in merge() can now be customized by passing a key function in a new optional key keyword argument, and a new optional reverse keyword argument can be used to reverse element comparison:

>>> import heapq
>>> a = ['9', '777', '55555']
>>> b = ['88', '6666']
>>> list(heapq.merge(a, b, key=len))
['9', '88', '777', '6666', '55555']
>>> list(heapq.merge(reversed(a), reversed(b), key=len, reverse=True))
['55555', '6666', '777', '88', '9']

(Contributed by Raymond Hettinger in bpo-13742 .)

http

A new HTTPStatus enum that defines a set of HTTP status codes, reason phrases and long descriptions written in English. (Contributed by Demian Brecht in bpo-21793 .)

http.client

HTTPConnection.getresponse() now raises a RemoteDisconnected exception when a remote server connection is closed unexpectedly. Additionally, if a ConnectionError (of which RemoteDisconnected is a subclass) is raised, the client socket is now closed automatically, and will reconnect on the next request:

import http.client
conn = http.client.HTTPConnection('www.python.org')
for retries in range(3):
    try:
        conn.request('GET', '/')
        resp = conn.getresponse()
    except http.client.RemoteDisconnected:
        pass

(Contributed by Martin Panter in bpo-3566 .)

idlelib and IDLE

Since idlelib implements the IDLE shell and editor and is not intended for import by other programs, it gets improvements with every release. See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for a cumulative list of changes since 3.4.0, as well as changes made in future 3.5.x releases. This file is also available from the IDLE Help ‣ About IDLE dialog.

imaplib

The IMAP4 class now supports the context manager protocol. When used in a with statement, the IMAP4 LOGOUT command will be called automatically at the end of the block. (Contributed by Tarek Ziadé and Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-4972 .)

The imaplib module now supports RFC 5161 (ENABLE Extension) and RFC 6855 (UTF-8 Support) via the IMAP4.enable() method. A new IMAP4.utf8_enabled attribute tracks whether or not RFC 6855 support is enabled. (Contributed by Milan Oberkirch, R. David Murray, and Maciej Szulik in bpo-21800 .)

The imaplib module now automatically encodes non-ASCII string usernames and passwords using UTF-8, as recommended by the RFCs. (Contributed by Milan Oberkirch in bpo-21800 .)

imghdr

The what() function now recognizes the OpenEXR format (contributed by Martin Vignali and Claudiu Popa in bpo-20295 ), and the WebP format (contributed by Fabrice Aneche and Claudiu Popa in bpo-20197 .)

importlib

The util.LazyLoader class allows for lazy loading of modules in applications where startup time is important. (Contributed by Brett Cannon in bpo-17621 .)

The abc.InspectLoader.source_to_code() method is now a static method. This makes it easier to initialize a module object with code compiled from a string by running exec(code, module.__dict__). (Contributed by Brett Cannon in bpo-21156 .)

The new util.module_from_spec() function is now the preferred way to create a new module. As opposed to creating a types.ModuleType instance directly, this new function will set the various import-controlled attributes based on the passed-in spec object. (Contributed by Brett Cannon in bpo-20383 .)

inspect

Both the Signature and Parameter classes are now picklable and hashable. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-20726 and bpo-20334 .)

A new BoundArguments.apply_defaults() method provides a way to set default values for missing arguments:

>>> def foo(a, b='ham', *args): pass
>>> ba = inspect.signature(foo).bind('spam')
>>> ba.apply_defaults()
>>> ba.arguments
OrderedDict([('a', 'spam'), ('b', 'ham'), ('args', ())])

(Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-24190 .)

A new class method Signature.from_callable() makes subclassing of Signature easier. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov and Eric Snow in bpo-17373 .)

The signature() function now accepts a follow_wrapped optional keyword argument, which, when set to False, disables automatic following of __wrapped__ links. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-20691 .)

A set of new functions to inspect coroutine functions and coroutine objects has been added: iscoroutine(), iscoroutinefunction(), isawaitable(), getcoroutinelocals(), and getcoroutinestate(). (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-24017 and bpo-24400 .)

The stack(), trace(), getouterframes(), and getinnerframes() functions now return a list of named tuples. (Contributed by Daniel Shahaf in bpo-16808 .)

io

A new BufferedIOBase.readinto1() method, that uses at most one call to the underlying raw stream’s RawIOBase.read() or RawIOBase.readinto() methods. (Contributed by Nikolaus Rath in bpo-20578 .)

ipaddress

Both the IPv4Network and IPv6Network classes now accept an (address, netmask) tuple argument, so as to easily construct network objects from existing addresses:

>>> import ipaddress
>>> ipaddress.IPv4Network(('127.0.0.0', 8))
IPv4Network('127.0.0.0/8')
>>> ipaddress.IPv4Network(('127.0.0.0', '255.0.0.0'))
IPv4Network('127.0.0.0/8')

(Contributed by Peter Moody and Antoine Pitrou in bpo-16531 .)

A new reverse_pointer attribute for the IPv4Network and IPv6Network classes returns the name of the reverse DNS PTR record:

>>> import ipaddress
>>> addr = ipaddress.IPv4Address('127.0.0.1')
>>> addr.reverse_pointer
'1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa'
>>> addr6 = ipaddress.IPv6Address('::1')
>>> addr6.reverse_pointer
'1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.ip6.arpa'

(Contributed by Leon Weber in bpo-20480 .)

json

The json.tool command line interface now preserves the order of keys in JSON objects passed in input. The new --sort-keys option can be used to sort the keys alphabetically. (Contributed by Berker Peksag in bpo-21650 .)

JSON decoder now raises JSONDecodeError instead of ValueError to provide better context information about the error. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-19361 .)

linecache

A new lazycache() function can be used to capture information about a non-file-based module to permit getting its lines later via getline(). This avoids doing I/O until a line is actually needed, without having to carry the module globals around indefinitely. (Contributed by Robert Collins in bpo-17911 .)

locale

A new delocalize() function can be used to convert a string into a normalized number string, taking the LC_NUMERIC settings into account:

>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_NUMERIC, 'de_DE.UTF-8')
'de_DE.UTF-8'
>>> locale.delocalize('1.234,56')
'1234.56'
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_NUMERIC, 'en_US.UTF-8')
'en_US.UTF-8'
>>> locale.delocalize('1,234.56')
'1234.56'

(Contributed by Cédric Krier in bpo-13918 .)

logging

All logging methods (Logger log(), exception(), critical(), debug(), etc.), now accept exception instances as an exc_info argument, in addition to boolean values and exception tuples:

>>> import logging
>>> try:
...     1/0
... except ZeroDivisionError as ex:
...     logging.error('exception', exc_info=ex)
ERROR:root:exception

(Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-20537 .)

The handlers.HTTPHandler class now accepts an optional ssl.SSLContext instance to configure SSL settings used in an HTTP connection. (Contributed by Alex Gaynor in bpo-22788 .)

The handlers.QueueListener class now takes a respect_handler_level keyword argument which, if set to True, will pass messages to handlers taking handler levels into account. (Contributed by Vinay Sajip.)

lzma

The LZMADecompressor.decompress() method now accepts an optional max_length argument to limit the maximum size of decompressed data. (Contributed by Martin Panter in bpo-15955 .)

math

Two new constants have been added to the math module: inf and nan. (Contributed by Mark Dickinson in bpo-23185 .)

A new function isclose() provides a way to test for approximate equality. (Contributed by Chris Barker and Tal Einat in bpo-24270 .)

A new gcd() function has been added. The fractions.gcd() function is now deprecated. (Contributed by Mark Dickinson and Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-22486 .)

multiprocessing

sharedctypes.synchronized() objects now support the context manager protocol. (Contributed by Charles-François Natali in bpo-21565 .)

operator

attrgetter(), itemgetter(), and methodcaller() objects now support pickling. (Contributed by Josh Rosenberg and Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-22955 .)

New matmul() and imatmul() functions to perform matrix multiplication. (Contributed by Benjamin Peterson in bpo-21176 .)

os

The new scandir() function returning an iterator of DirEntry objects has been added. If possible, scandir() extracts file attributes while scanning a directory, removing the need to perform subsequent system calls to determine file type or attributes, which may significantly improve performance. (Contributed by Ben Hoyt with the help of Victor Stinner in bpo-22524 .)

On Windows, a new stat_result.st_file_attributes attribute is now available. It corresponds to the dwFileAttributes member of the BY_HANDLE_FILE_INFORMATION structure returned by GetFileInformationByHandle(). (Contributed by Ben Hoyt in bpo-21719 .)

The urandom() function now uses the getrandom() syscall on Linux 3.17 or newer, and getentropy() on OpenBSD 5.6 and newer, removing the need to use /dev/urandom and avoiding failures due to potential file descriptor exhaustion. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-22181 .)

New get_blocking() and set_blocking() functions allow getting and setting a file descriptor’s blocking mode (O_NONBLOCK.) (Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-22054 .)

The truncate() and ftruncate() functions are now supported on Windows. (Contributed by Steve Dower in bpo-23668 .)

There is a new os.path.commonpath() function returning the longest common sub-path of each passed pathname. Unlike the os.path.commonprefix() function, it always returns a valid path:

>>> os.path.commonprefix(['/usr/lib', '/usr/local/lib'])
'/usr/l'

>>> os.path.commonpath(['/usr/lib', '/usr/local/lib'])
'/usr'

(Contributed by Rafik Draoui and Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-10395 .)

pathlib

The new Path.samefile() method can be used to check whether the path points to the same file as another path, which can be either another Path object, or a string:

>>> import pathlib
>>> p1 = pathlib.Path('/etc/hosts')
>>> p2 = pathlib.Path('/etc/../etc/hosts')
>>> p1.samefile(p2)
True

(Contributed by Vajrasky Kok and Antoine Pitrou in bpo-19775 .)

The Path.mkdir() method now accepts a new optional exist_ok argument to match mkdir -p and os.makedirs() functionality. (Contributed by Berker Peksag in bpo-21539 .)

There is a new Path.expanduser() method to expand ~ and ~user prefixes. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka and Claudiu Popa in bpo-19776 .)

A new Path.home() class method can be used to get a Path instance representing the user’s home directory. (Contributed by Victor Salgado and Mayank Tripathi in bpo-19777 .)

New Path.write_text(), Path.read_text(), Path.write_bytes(), Path.read_bytes() methods to simplify read/write operations on files.

The following code snippet will create or rewrite existing file ~/spam42:

>>> import pathlib
>>> p = pathlib.Path('~/spam42')
>>> p.expanduser().write_text('ham')
3

(Contributed by Christopher Welborn in bpo-20218 .)

pickle

Nested objects, such as unbound methods or nested classes, can now be pickled using pickle protocols older than protocol version 4. Protocol version 4 already supports these cases. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-23611 .)

poplib

A new POP3.utf8() command enables RFC 6856 (Internationalized Email) support, if a POP server supports it. (Contributed by Milan OberKirch in bpo-21804 .)

re

References and conditional references to groups with fixed length are now allowed in lookbehind assertions:

>>> import re
>>> pat = re.compile(r'(a|b).(?<=\1)c')
>>> pat.match('aac')
<_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(0, 3), match='aac'>
>>> pat.match('bbc')
<_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(0, 3), match='bbc'>

(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-9179 .)

The number of capturing groups in regular expressions is no longer limited to 100. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-22437 .)

The sub() and subn() functions now replace unmatched groups with empty strings instead of raising an exception. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-1519638 .)

The re.error exceptions have new attributes, msg, pattern, pos, lineno, and colno, that provide better context information about the error:

>>> re.compile("""
...     (?x)
...     .++
... """)
Traceback (most recent call last):
   ...
sre_constants.error: multiple repeat at position 16 (line 3, column 7)

(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-22578 .)

readline

A new append_history_file() function can be used to append the specified number of trailing elements in history to the given file. (Contributed by Bruno Cauet in bpo-22940 .)

selectors

The new DevpollSelector supports efficient /dev/poll polling on Solaris. (Contributed by Giampaolo Rodola’ in bpo-18931 .)

shutil

The move() function now accepts a copy_function argument, allowing, for example, the copy() function to be used instead of the default copy2() if there is a need to ignore file metadata when moving. (Contributed by Claudiu Popa in bpo-19840 .)

The make_archive() function now supports the xztar format. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-5411 .)

signal

On Windows, the set_wakeup_fd() function now also supports socket handles. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-22018 .)

Various SIG* constants in the signal module have been converted into Enums. This allows meaningful names to be printed during debugging, instead of integer “magic numbers”. (Contributed by Giampaolo Rodola’ in bpo-21076 .)

smtpd

Both the SMTPServer and SMTPChannel classes now accept a decode_data keyword argument to determine if the DATA portion of the SMTP transaction is decoded using the "utf-8" codec or is instead provided to the SMTPServer.process_message() method as a byte string. The default is True for backward compatibility reasons, but will change to False in Python 3.6. If decode_data is set to False, the process_message method must be prepared to accept keyword arguments. (Contributed by Maciej Szulik in bpo-19662 .)

The SMTPServer class now advertises the 8BITMIME extension (RFC 6152 ) if decode_data has been set True. If the client specifies BODY=8BITMIME on the MAIL command, it is passed to SMTPServer.process_message() via the mail_options keyword. (Contributed by Milan Oberkirch and R. David Murray in bpo-21795 .)

The SMTPServer class now also supports the SMTPUTF8 extension (RFC 6531 : Internationalized Email). If the client specified SMTPUTF8 BODY=8BITMIME on the MAIL command, they are passed to SMTPServer.process_message() via the mail_options keyword. It is the responsibility of the process_message method to correctly handle the SMTPUTF8 data. (Contributed by Milan Oberkirch in bpo-21725 .)

It is now possible to provide, directly or via name resolution, IPv6 addresses in the SMTPServer constructor, and have it successfully connect. (Contributed by Milan Oberkirch in bpo-14758 .)

smtplib

A new SMTP.auth() method provides a convenient way to implement custom authentication mechanisms. (Contributed by Milan Oberkirch in bpo-15014 .)

The SMTP.set_debuglevel() method now accepts an additional debuglevel (2), which enables timestamps in debug messages. (Contributed by Gavin Chappell and Maciej Szulik in bpo-16914 .)

Both the SMTP.sendmail() and SMTP.send_message() methods now support RFC 6531 (SMTPUTF8). (Contributed by Milan Oberkirch and R. David Murray in bpo-22027 .)

sndhdr

The what() and whathdr() functions now return a namedtuple(). (Contributed by Claudiu Popa in bpo-18615 .)

socket

Functions with timeouts now use a monotonic clock, instead of a system clock. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-22043 .)

A new socket.sendfile() method allows sending a file over a socket by using the high-performance os.sendfile() function on UNIX, resulting in uploads being from 2 to 3 times faster than when using plain socket.send(). (Contributed by Giampaolo Rodola’ in bpo-17552 .)

The