Ask HN: What are some unusual but useful Python libraries you've discovered?

I really like xmltodict (https://github.com/martinblech/xmltodict). Despite the name, it works in both directions. It is the most ergonomic library I have used for creating XML. It has external type stubs: https://pypi.org/project/types-xmltodict/.

Since you have recently discovered Rich, you may want rich-argparse (https://github.com/hamdanal/rich-argparse). It colorizes argparse CLIs with little effort from the user.

DeepDiff (https://github.com/seperman/deepdiff) has helped me with testing. I needed to compare two nested data structures but ignore any differences in floats (timestamps). DeepDiff let me do it:

  diff = DeepDiff(
     run_session(config), run_session(config, force=True), exclude_types=(float,)
  )

  assert not diff

context: OpenAI API used to be super flaky back in the early days, i needed to retry my requests quite frequently and i found this

https://librosa.org/

Audio track seperation:

https://github.com/adefossez/demucs

demucs works pretty well.

The alternative is either you maintain two interfaces with boilerplate, or write a cli only if that’s the first priority.

Similar solutions exist, like fire. But fire’s cli is like an afterthought, in the sense it gives people a way to run things in command line where they already know how to run it from Python.

https://opensoundscape.org/en/latest/

[1] https://github.com/tlocke/pg8000

- einops

- pytrees

- torchinfo

- joblib

- symbex

- nbdev