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