Porting Notes¶

bsddb¶

The bsddb and dbm.bsd modules have been removed. Bindings for Berkeley DB are now maintained outside of the standard library as bsddb3.

commands¶

The commands module was deprecated in Python 2.6 and removed in Python 3.0. See subprocess instead.

compiler¶

The compiler module has been removed. See ast instead.

dircache¶

The dircache module has been removed, without a replacement.

EasyDialogs¶

The EasyDialogs module has been removed. See tkinter instead.

exceptions¶

The exceptions module has been removed because all of the exceptions defined there are available as built-in classes.

htmllib¶

The htmllib module has been removed. See html.parser instead.

md5¶

The implementation of the MD5 message digest algorithm has moved to hashlib.

mimetools, MimeWriter, mimify, multifile, and rfc822¶

The mimetools, MimeWriter, mimify, multifile, and rfc822 modules have been removed. See email instead.

popen2¶

The popen2 module has been removed. See subprocess instead.

posixfile¶

The posixfile module has been removed. See io instead.

sets¶

The sets module was deprecated in Python 2.6 and removed in Python 3.0. Use the built-in types set and orderedset instead.

sha¶

The implementation of the SHA-1 message digest algorithm has moved to hashlib.

sre¶

The sre module was deprecated in Python 2.5 and removed in Python 3.0. Use re instead.

statvfs¶

The statvfs module was deprecated in Python 2.6 and removed in Python 3.0. See os.statvfs() in the os module instead.

thread¶

The thread module has been removed. Use the higher-level API in threading instead.

user¶

The user module was deprecated in Python 2.6 and removed in Python 3.0. See user-customization features provided by the site module instead.

asyncore and asynchat¶

Asynchronous I/O and protocol handlers. See asyncio instead.

formatter¶

Generic output formatter and device interface. See Python issue 18716 for details.

imp¶

Access the implementation of the import statement. See importlib instead.

optparse¶

Command-line option parsing library. The API for argparse is similar to the one provided by optparse, and in many cases argparse can be used as a straightforward replacement by updating the names of the classes and methods used.

abc¶

The abstractproperty(), abstractclassmethod(), and abstractstaticmethod() decorators are deprecated. Combining abstractmethod() with the property(), classmethod(), and staticmethod() decorators works as expected (Python issue 11610).

anydbm¶

The anydbm module has been renamed dbm in Python 3.

argparse¶

The version argument to ArgumentParser has been removed in favor of a special action type (Python issue 13248).

The old form passed version as an argument.

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(version='1.0')

The new form requires adding an explicit argument definition.

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('--version', action='version',
                    version='%(prog)s 1.0')

The option name and version format string can be modified to suit the needs of the application.

In Python 3.4, the version action was changed to print the version string to stdout instead of stderr (Python issue 18920).

array¶

The 'c' type used for character bytes in early version of Python 2 has been removed. Use 'b' or 'B' for bytes instead.

The 'u' type for characters from Unicode strings has been deprecated and will be removed in Python 4.0.

The methods tostring() and fromstring() have been renamed tobytes() and frombytes() to remove ambiguity (Python issue 8990).

atexit¶

When atexit was updated to include a C implementation (Python issue 1680961), a regression was introduced in the error handling logic that caused only the summary of the exception to be shown, without the traceback. This regression was fixed in Python 3.3 (Python issue 18776).

base64¶

The encodestring() and decodestring() have been renamed encodebytes() and decodebytes() respectively. The old names still work as aliases, but are deprecated (Python issue 3613).

Two new encodings using 85-character alphabets have been added. b85encode() implements an encoding used in Mercurial and git, while a85encode() implements the Ascii85 format used by PDF files (Python issue 17618).

bz2¶

BZ2File instances now support the context manager protocol, and do not need to be wrapped with contextlib.closing().

collections¶

The abstract base classes formerly defined in collections moved to collections.abc, with backwards-compatibility imports in collections, for now (Python issue 11085).

comands¶

The functions getoutput() and getstatusoutput() have been moved to subprocess and commands has been deleted.

configparser¶

The old ConfigParser module has been renamed to configparser.

The old ConfigParser class was removed in favor of SafeConfigParser which has in turn been renamed to ConfigParser. The deprecated interpolation behavior is available via LegacyInterpolation.

The read() method now supports an encoding argument, so it is no longer necessary to use codecs to read configuration files with Unicode values in them.

Using the old RawConfigParser is discouraged. New projects should use ConfigParser(interpolation=None) instead to achieve the same behavior.

contextlib¶

contextlib.nested() has been removed. Pass multiple context managers to the same with statement instead.

csv¶

Instead of using the next() method of a reader directly, use the built-in next() function to invoke the iterator properly.

datetime¶

Starting with Python 3.3, equality comparisons between naive and timezone-aware datetime instances return False instead of raising TypeError (Python issue 15006).

Prior to Python 3.5, a datetime.time object representing midnight evaluated to False when converted to a Boolean. This behavior has been removed in Python 3.5 (Python issue 13936).

decimal¶

Python 3.3 incorporated a C implementation of decimal based on libmpdec. This change improved performance, but also includes some API changes and behavior differences from the pure-Python implementation. See the Python 3.3 release notes for details.

fractions¶

The from_float() and from_decimal() class methods are no longer needed. Floating point and Decimal values can be passed directly to the Fraction constructor.

gc¶

The flags DEBUG_OBJECT and DEBUG_INSTANCE have been removed. They are no longer needed to differentiate between new and old-style classes.

gettext¶

All of the translation functions in gettext assume Unicode input and output, and the Unicode variants such as ugettext() have been removed.

glob¶

The new function escape() implements a work-around for searching for files with meta-characters in the name (Python issue 8402).

http.cookies¶

In addition to escaping quotes, SimpleCookie also encodes commas and semi-colons in values to better reflect behavior in real browsers (Python issue 9824).

imaplib¶

Under Python 3, imaplib returns byte-strings encoded as UTF-8. There is support for accepting Unicode strings and encoding them automatically as outgoing commands are sent or as the username and password for logging in to the server.

importlib¶

The find_loader() function is deprecated. Use importlib.util.find_spec() instead.

inspect¶

The functions getargspec(), getfullargspec(), getargvalues(), getcallargs(), getargvalues(), formatargspec(), and formatargvalues() have been deprecated in favor of signature() (Python issue 20438).

itertools¶

The functions imap(), izip(), and ifilter() have been replaced with versions of the built-in functions that return iterables instead of list objects (map(), zip(), and filter:() respectively).

The function ifilterfalse() has been renamed filterfalse().

json¶

The json API was updated to only support str and not with bytes because the JSON specification is defined using Unicode.

locale¶

The normalized version of the name of the UTF-8 encoding has changed from “UTF8” to “UTF-8” because Mac OS X and OpenBSD do not support the use of “UTF8” (Python issue 10154 and Python issue 10090).

logging¶

The logging module now includes a lastResort logger that is used if no other logging configuration is performed by an application. This eliminates the need to configure logging in an application solely to avoid having a user see error messages in case a library imported by an application uses logging but the application itself does not.

mailbox¶

mailbox reads and writes mailbox files in binary mode, relying on the email package to parse messages. StringIO and text file input is deprecated (Python issue 9124).

mmap¶

Values returned from read APIs are byte strings, and need to be decoded before being treated as text.

operator¶

The div() function has been removed. Use either floordiv() or truediv(), depending on the desired semantics.

The repeat() function is removed. Use mul() instead.

The functions getslice(), setslice(), and delslice() are removed. Use getitem(), setitem(), and delitem() with slice indexes instead.

The function isCallable() has been removed. Use the abstract base class collections.Callable instead.

isinstance(obj, collections.Callable)

The type checking functions isMappingType(), isSequenceType(), and isNumberType() have been removed. Use the relevant abstract base classes from collections or numbers instead.

isinstance(obj, collections.Mapping)
isinstance(obj, collections.Sequence)
isinstance(obj, numbers.Number)

The sequenceIncludes() function has been removed. Use contains() instead.

os¶

The functions popen2(), popen3(), and popen4() have been removed. popen() is still present but deprecated and emits warnings if used. Code using these functions should be rewritten to use subprocess instead to be more portable across operating systems.

The functions os.tmpnam(), os.tempnam() and os.tmpfile() have been removed. Use the tempfile module instead.

The function os.stat_float_times() is deprecated (Python issue 14711).

os.unsetenv() no longer ignores errors (Python issue 13415).

os.path¶

os.path.walk() has been removed. Use os.walk() instead.

pdb¶

The print command alias has been removed so that it does not shadow the print() function (Python issue 18764). The p shortcut is retained.

pickle¶

The C implementation of the pickle module from Python 2 has been moved to a new module that is automatically used to replace the Python implementation when possible. The old import idiom of looking for cPickle before pickle is no longer needed.

try:
   import cPickle as pickle
except:
   import pickle

With the automatic import of the C implementation, it is only necessary to import the pickle module directly.

import pickle

Interoperability between Python 2.x and 3.x has been improved for pickled data using the level 2 protocol or lower to resolve an issue introduced when a large number of standard library modules were renamed during the transition to Python 3. Because pickled data includes references to class and type names, and those names changed, it was difficult to exchange pickled data between Python 2 and 3 programs. Now for data pickled using protocol level 2 or older, the old names of the classes are automatically used when writing to and reading from a pickle stream.

This behavior is available by default, and can be turned off using the fix_imports option. This change improves the situation, but does not eliminate incompatibilities entirely. In particular, it is possible that data pickled under Python 3.1 can’t be read under Python 3.0. To ensure maximum portability between Python 3 applications, use protocol level 3, which does not include this compatibility feature.

The default protocol version has changed from 0, the human-readable version, to 3, the binary format with the best interoperability when shared between Python 3 applications.

Byte string data written to a pickle by a Python 2.x application is decoded when it is read back to create a Unicode string object. The encoding for the transformation defaults to ASCII, and can be changed by passing values to the Unpickler.

pipes¶

pipes.quote() has moved to shlex (Python issue 9723).

platform¶

platform.popen() has been deprecated. Use subprocess.popen() instead (Python issue 11377).

platform.uname() now returns a namedtuple.

Because Linux distributions do not have a consistent way to describe themselves, the functions for getting the descriptions (platform.dist() and platform.linux_distribution()) are deprecated and scheduled to be removed in Python 3.7 (Python issue 1322).

random¶

The function jumpahead() was removed in Python 3.0.

re¶

The UNICODE flag represents the default behavior. To restore the ASCII-specific behavior from Python 2, use the ASCII flag.

shelve¶

The default output format for shelve may create a file with a .db extension added to the name given to shelve.open().

signal¶

PEP 475 means that system calls interrupted and returning with EINTR are retried. This changes the behavior of signal handlers and other system calls, since now after the signal handler returns the interrupted call will be retried, unless the signal handler raises an exception. Refer to the PEP documentation for complete details.

socket¶

Under Python 2 typically str objects could be sent directly over a socket. Because str replaces unicode, in Python 3 the values must be encoded before being sent. The examples in the socket section use byte strings, which are already encoded.

socketserver¶

The socketserver module was named SocketServer under Python 2.

string¶

All functions from the string module that are also methods of str objects have been removed.

The constants letters, lowercase, and uppercase have been removed. The new constants with similar names are limited to the ASCII character set.

The maketrans() function has been replaced by methods on str, bytes, and bytearray to clarify which input types are supported by each translation table.

struct¶

struct.pack() now only supports byte strings when using the s string pack code, and no longer implicitly encodes string objects to UTF-8 (Python issue 10783).

subprocess¶

The default value for the close_fds argument to subprocess.Popen has changed from always being False. It always defaults to True under Unix. It defaults to True under Windows if the standard I/O stream arguments are set to None, otherwise it defaults to False.

sys¶

The variable sys.exitfunc is no longer checked for a clean-up action to be run when a program exits. Use atexit instead.

The variable sys.subversion is no longer defined.

Flags sys.flags.py3k_warning, sys.flags.division_warning, sys.flags.division_new, sys.flags.tabcheck, and sys.flags.unicode are no longer defined.

The variable sys.maxint is no longer defined, use sys.maxsize instead. See PEP 237 (Unifying Long Integers and Integers).

The global exception tracking variables sys.exc_type, sys.exc_value, and sys.exc_traceback have been removed. The function sys.exc_clear() has also been removed.

The variable sys.version_info is now a :py``namedtuple`` instance with attributes major, minor, micro, releaselevel, and serial (Python issue 4285).

The check interval feature, controlling the number of opcodes to execute before allowing a thread context switch has been replaced with an absolute time value instead, managed with sys.setswitchinterval(). The old functions for managing the check interval, sys.getcheckinterval() and sys.setcheckinterval(), are deprecated.

The sys.meta_path and sys.path_hooks variables now expose all of the path finders and entry hooks for importing modules. In earlier versions, only finders and hooks explicitly added to the path were exposed, and the C import used values in its implementation that could not be modified from the outside.

For Linux systems, sys.platform no longer includes the version number. The value is now just linux and not linux2 or linux3.

threading¶

The thread module is deprecated in favor of the API in threading.

The debugging features of threading, including the “verbose” argument has been removed from the APIs (Python issue 13550).

Older implementations of threading used factory functions for some of the classes because they were implemented in C as extension types and could not be subclassed. That limitation of the language has been removed, and so many of the old factory functions have been converted to standard classes, which allow subclassing (Python issue 10968).

The public symbols exported from threading have been renamed to be PEP 8 compliant. The old names are retained for backwards compatibility, but they will be removed in a future release.

time¶

time.asctime() and time.ctime() have been reimplemented to not use the system functions of the same time to allow larger years to be used. time.ctime() now supports years from 1900 through maxint, although for values higher than 9999 the output string is longer than the standard 24 characters to allow for the extra year digits (Python issue 8013).

unittest¶

The TestCase methods starting with “fail” (failIf(), failUnless(), etc.) have been deprecated. Use the alternate form of the assert methods instead.

Several older method aliases have been deprecated and replaced with preferred names. Using the deprecated names produces a warning (Python issue 9424). See the table below for a mapping between the old and new names.

UserDict, UserList, and UserString¶

The UserDict, UserList, and UserString classes have been moved out of their own modules into the collections module. dict, list, and str can be subclassed directly, but the classes in collections may make implementing the subclass simpler because the content of the container is available directly through an instance attribute. The abstract classes in collections.abc are also useful for creating custom containers that follow the APIs of the built-in types.

uuid¶

uuid.getnode() now uses the PATH environment variable to find programs that can report the MAC address of the host under Unix (Python issue 19855). It falls back to looking in /sbin and /usr/sbin if no program is found on the search path. This search behavior may give different results than with earlier versions of Python if alternate versions of programs like netstat, ifconfig, ip, and arp are present and produce different output.

whichdb¶

The functionality of whichdb has moved to the dbm module.

xml.etree.ElementTree¶

XMLTreeBuilder has been renamed TreeBuilder, and the API has undergone several changes.

ElementTree.getchildren() has been deprecated. Use list(elem) to build a list of the children.

ElementTree.getiterator() has been deprecated. Use iter() to create an iterator using the normal iterator protocol instead.

When parsing fails, rather than raising xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError, XMLParser now raises xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError.

zipimport¶

The data returned from get_data() is a byte string, and needs to be decoded before being used as a unicode string.