Turning an AST node / subnodes into something human-readable

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 7:05 PM, Irmen de Jong <irmen.NOSPAM at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> On 19-2-2014 4:58, Chris Angelico wrote:
>
>> but what I'd really like to do is get something that looks
>> approximately like "x[1]". Is there an easy way to do that? Its str
>> and repr aren't useful, and I can't see a "reconstitute" method on the
>> node, nor a function in ast itself for the job. In theory I could
>> write one, but it'd need to understand every node type, so it seems
>> the most logical place would be on the node itself - maybe in __str__.
>>
>> Is there anything nice and easy? I don't care if it's not perfect, as
>> long as it's more readable than ast.dump(). :)
>>
>
> Maybe this https://pypi.python.org/pypi/astor can do what you want?
> (found it by following a few links starting from
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/768634/python-parse-a-py-file-read-the-ast-modify-it-then-write-back-the-modified)
>

Hmm. I saw a few (things like codegen), but was hoping to stick to the
standard library - introducing a dependency in a small script just for
the sake of tidy output is a bit messy. Oh well. Some things just
aren't as ideal as I'd like. Thanks Irmen!

ChrisA