5 New, Improved, and Deprecated Modules

As usual, Python's standard library received a number of enhancements and bug fixes. Here's a partial list of the most notable changes, sorted alphabetically by module name. Consult the Misc/NEWS file in the source tree for a more complete list of changes, or look through the CVS logs for all the details.

A new hashlib module has been added to replace the md5 and sha modules. hashlib adds support for additional secure hashes (SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512). When available, the module uses OpenSSL for fast platform optimized implementations of algorithms. The old md5 and sha modules still exist as wrappers around hashlib to preserve backwards compatibility. (Contributed by Gregory P. Smith.)

The nsmallest() and nlargest() functions in the heapq module now support a key keyword argument similar to the one provided by the min()/max() functions and the sort() methods. For example: Example:

>>> import heapq
>>> L = ["short", 'medium', 'longest', 'longer still']
>>> heapq.nsmallest(2, L)  # Return two lowest elements, lexicographically
['longer still', 'longest']
>>> heapq.nsmallest(2, L, key=len)   # Return two shortest elements
['short', 'medium']

(Contributed by Raymond Hettinger.)

The itertools.islice() function now accepts None for the start and step arguments. This makes it more compatible with the attributes of slice objects, so that you can now write the following:

s = slice(5)     # Create slice object
itertools.islice(iterable, s.start, s.stop, s.step)

(Contributed by Raymond Hettinger.)

The operator module's itemgetter() and attrgetter() functions now support multiple fields. A call such as operator.attrgetter('a', 'b') will return a function that retrieves the a and b attributes. Combining this new feature with the sort() method's key parameter lets you easily sort lists using multiple fields.

The os module underwent a number of changes. The stat_float_times variable now defaults to true, meaning that os.stat() will now return time values as floats. (This doesn't necessarily mean that os.stat() will return times that are precise to fractions of a second; not all systems support such precision.)

Constants named os.SEEK_SET, os.SEEK_CUR, and os.SEEK_END have been added; these are the parameters to the os.lseek() function. Two new constants for locking are os.O_SHLOCK and os.O_EXLOCK.

On FreeBSD, the os.stat() function now returns times with nanosecond resolution, and the returned object now has st_gen and st_birthtime. The st_flags member is also available, if the platform supports it.

New module: spwd provides functions for accessing the shadow password database on systems that support it.

The TarFile class in the tarfile module now has an extractall() method that extracts all members from the archive into the current working directory. It's also possible to set a different directory as the extraction target, and to unpack only a subset of the archive's members.

A tarfile's compression can be autodetected by using the mode 'r|*'. (Contributed by Lars Gustäbel.)

The xmlrpclib module now supports returning datetime objects for the XML-RPC date type. Supply use_datetime=True to the loads() function or the Unmarshaller class to enable this feature.

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