astor is designed to allow easy manipulation of Python source via the AST. There
are some other similar libraries, but astor focuses on the following areas:
* Round-trip back to Python via Armin Ronacher's codegen.py module:
** Modified AST doesn't need linenumbers, ctx, etc. or otherwise be directly
compileable
** Easy to read generated code as, well, code
* Dump pretty-printing of AST
** Harder to read than round-tripped code, but more accurate to figure out
what is going on.
** Easier to read than dump from built-in AST module
* Non-recursive treewalk
** Sometimes you want a recursive treewalk (and astor supports that, starting
at any node on the tree), but sometimes you don't need to do that. astor
doesn't require you to explicitly visit sub-nodes unless you want to:
** You can add code that executes before a node's children are visited,
and/or
** You can add code that executes after a node's children are visited, and/or
** You can add code that executes and keeps the node's children from being
visited (and optionally visit them yourself via a recursive call)
** Write functions to access the tree based on object names and/or attribute
names
** Enjoy easy access to parent node(s) for tree rewriting
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