Upgrade to Python 3

Stetl development started in Python 2. With PEP 373 the EOL of python 2.7 was announced and python 2 will not be officialy supported after 2020. Stetl was therefore upgraded to Python 3.

Python 3

Work started early 2019 to upgrade Stetl from Python 2 to Python 3. The last version of Stetl that supports Python 2 is version 1.3. This version might receive quick fixes and updates, but users are encouraged to upgrade to Stetl version 2 or higher and thus use Python 3.

For the full discussion on the Python 2 to Python 3 migration: see the conversation in pull request #81 within the GitHub repository.

Important changes for developers

Python 2 and 3 are very similar, but there are a couple of important changes that developers need to keep in mind and are worth mentioning:

  • Stetl 2 supports Python 3.6 (3.4 and 3.5 were dropped) and higher (so with support of f strings)

  • Python 3 uses Unicode strings, meaning encoding/decoding is a bit different

  • stringIO and cstringIO were moved around

  • slight syntax change on calling next() for iterators

  • update on import statements

  • differences in urllib to make http-calls (although issue 80 might change it to the requests library).

Important changes for users

The specification of the Stetl tool chain uses a configuration file. You can use the Inputs, Filters, and Outputs that are provided by Stetl, or write your own. If you use Stetl Components in your configuration, you must specify the stetl. package prefix in the class specification. For example before Stetl version 2 the input XML file was specified as

[input_xml_file]
class = inputs.fileinput.XmlFileInput
file_path = input/cities.xml

for Stetl version 2 this is changed to

[input_xml_file]
class = stetl.inputs.fileinput.XmlFileInput
file_path = input/cities.xml

Note the extra stetl. part in the class specification.