Tomli

A lil' TOML parser

Table of Contents generated with mdformat-toc

• Intro
• Installation
• Usage
  • Parse a TOML string
  • Parse a TOML file
  • Handle invalid TOML
  • Construct decimal.Decimals from TOML floats
• FAQ
  • Why this parser?
  • Is comment preserving round-trip parsing supported?
  • Is there a dumps, write or encode function?
  • How do TOML types map into Python types?
• Performance

Intro

Tomli is a Python library for parsing TOML. Tomli is fully compatible with TOML v1.0.0.

Installation

pip install tomli

Usage

Parse a TOML string

import tomli

toml_str = """
           gretzky = 99

           [kurri]
           jari = 17
           """

toml_dict = tomli.loads(toml_str)
assert toml_dict == {"gretzky": 99, "kurri": {"jari": 17}}

Parse a TOML file

import tomli

with open("path_to_file/conf.toml", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    toml_dict = tomli.load(f)

Handle invalid TOML

import tomli

try:
    toml_dict = tomli.loads("]] this is invalid TOML [[")
except tomli.TOMLDecodeError:
    print("Yep, definitely not valid.")

Construct decimal.Decimals from TOML floats

from decimal import Decimal
import tomli

toml_dict = tomli.loads("precision-matters = 0.982492", parse_float=Decimal)
assert isinstance(toml_dict["precision-matters"], Decimal)

FAQ

Why this parser?

• it's lil'
• pure Python with zero dependencies
• as fast as pure Python allows
• 100% spec compliance: passes all tests in a test set soon to be merged to the official compliance tests for TOML repository
• 100% test coverage

Is comment preserving round-trip parsing supported?

No. The tomli.loads function returns a plain dict that is populated with builtin types and types from the standard library only. Preserving comments requires a custom type to be returned so will not be supported, at least not by the tomli.loads function.

Is there a dumps, write or encode function?

Not yet, and it's possible there never will be. This library is deliberately minimal, and most TOML use cases are read-only. Also, most use cases where writes are relevant could also benefit from comment and whitespace preserving reads, which this library does not currently support.

How do TOML types map into Python types?

Performance

The benchmark/ folder in this repository contains a performance benchmark for comparing the various Python TOML parsers. The benchmark can be run with tox -e benchmark-pypi. On May 29 2021 running the benchmark output the following on my notebook computer.

foo@bar:~/dev/tomli$ tox -e benchmark-pypi
benchmark-pypi installed: attrs==19.3.0,click==7.1.2,pytomlpp==1.0.2,qtoml==0.3.0,rtoml==0.6.1,toml==0.10.2,tomli==0.2.3,tomlkit==0.7.2
benchmark-pypi run-test-pre: PYTHONHASHSEED='2295586404'
benchmark-pypi run-test: commands[0] | python benchmark/run.py
Parsing data.toml 5000 times:
------------------------------------------------------
    parser |  exec time | performance (more is better)
-----------+------------+-----------------------------
  pytomlpp |     1.14 s | baseline (100%)
     rtoml |     1.16 s | 98.13%
     tomli |     7.58 s | 15.07%
      toml |     9.35 s | 12.21%
     qtoml |     15.4 s | 7.43%
   tomlkit |     68.3 s | 1.67%

The parsers are ordered from fastest to slowest, using the fastest parser (pytomlpp) as baseline. Tomli performed the best out of all pure Python TOML parsers, losing only to pytomlpp (wraps C++) and rtoml (wraps Rust).