About

Pyrels is a tool for exploring and visualizing relationships between Python objects. It does so by analysing and converting Python namespaces into GraphViz files in the DOT format. That means it displays relationships like references between Python names and the objects they point to, as well as containment between Python container objects (lists, tuples and dictionaries) and the respective objects they contain.

At the moment pyrels is best used on Python data structures, but it is intended to develop it further so that it can also display other types of relationships like inheritance, module imports, etc.

One target group for pyrels are article and/or book authors who wish to illustrate Python data structures graphically without spending a lot of time for creating these illustrations manually. Pyrels can help you automate this process.

Installation

After downloading the file pyrels-0.2.0.tar.gz in your download directory, change into this directory and run the following command to unpack pyrels:

$ tar xfz pyrels-0.2.0.tar.gz

Then change into the newly created directory pyrels and install pyrels by running the following command:

$ python setup.py install

This will install a Python package named pyrels in the site-packages subfolder of your Python interpreter and a script tool named pyrels in your bin directory, usually in /usr/local/bin.

Dependencies

Some of pyrels' functions call command-line tools installed with GraphViz, like dot, neato, etc. In order for these to work you must have GraphViz installed.

Examples

From the system command-line you use pyrels e.g. like this:

$ pyrels "L = [1, 'two', None]"

You can use pyrels also as a Python package e.g. like this:

>>> from pyrels.pyrels2dot import namespace2dot as ns2dot
>>> ns2dot(ns, outPathDot, gvtool="dot", format="pdf")

Testing

The pyrels package comes with a Unittest test suite which can be run like this before (or after) building the package:

$ cd test
$ python test_all.py

After the test run you'll find some PDF files in the directory test/output.

Bug reports

Please report bugs and patches to Dinu Gherman <gherman@darwin.in-berlin.de>. Don't forget to include information about operating system, Python and GraphViz versions being used.