I developed a function (shown below) to check if a sparse matrix is symmetric and would like to know if the community is interested to include in scipy.sparse.

Regards,
Saullo

def is_symmetric(m):
    """Check if a sparse matrix is symmetric

    Parameters
    ----------
    m : array or sparse matrix
        A square matrix.

    Returns
    -------
    check : bool
        The check result.

    """
    if m.shape[0] != m.shape[1]:
        raise ValueError('m must be a square matrix')

    if not isinstance(m, coo_matrix):
        m = coo_matrix(m)

    r, c, v = m.row, m.col, m.data
    tril_no_diag = r > c
    triu_no_diag = c > r

    if triu_no_diag.sum() != tril_no_diag.sum():
        return False

    rl = r[tril_no_diag]
    cl = c[tril_no_diag]
    vl = v[tril_no_diag]
    ru = r[triu_no_diag]
    cu = c[triu_no_diag]
    vu = v[triu_no_diag]

    sortl = np.lexsort((cl, rl))
    sortu = np.lexsort((ru, cu))
    vl = vl[sortl]
    vu = vu[sortu]

    check = np.allclose(vl, vu)

    return check