Mailman 3 Python standard library TOML module - Python-ideas

9 Dec 2021

      Title: Python standard library TOML module

Hello everyone,

ITT I propose the idea of a TOML module in the standard library for general TOML operations.

The main motivator of this is the growing adoption of PEP 517. Recently I've been following its developments and I've noticed some situations that could make things a bit harder at the moment of working with build systems based on it. Namely I saw that dependency problems like cycles or complicated dependency graphs.

For instance, we have a build system module that depends on a TOML module and the latter depends on the former or on another build system, leading to square one. Chicken and egg scenarios could also be conceived as a consequence of not having an included TOML module for operations with the pyproject.toml file.

The inclusion of a TOML module in the standard library can solve this kind of scenarios by providing an API for TOML deserialization and serialization.

I also propose that the module API can modeled around the existing json module from the stdlib just to make design and usage easier.

Some snippets the module in action:

```python
...
...
...
import toml
# deserialization
toml.dumps({'bar': [{'foo': 'salute'}]})
'[[bar]]\nfoo = "salute"\n'
# serialization
toml.loads('foo = ""\nbar = ["bar", "", "1.0", "2"]')
{'foo': '', 'bar': ['bar', '', '1.0', '2']}

Pleased to listen your opinions on this

Python standard library TOML module

Martin Reboredo

Valentin Berlier

Christopher Barker

Sebastian Koslowski

Finn Mason

Pradyun Gedam

Neil Girdhar

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participants (7)