inline-python

Inline Python code directly in your Rust code.

Example

use inline_python::python;

fn main() {
    let who = "world";
    let n = 5;
    python! {
        for i in range('n):
            print(i, "Hello", 'who)
        print("Goodbye")
    }
}

How to use

Use the python!{..} macro to write Python code directly in your Rust code.

NOTE: Rust nightly toolchain is required. Feature proc_macro_span is still unstable, for more details check out issue #54725 - Tracking issue for proc_macro::Span inspection APIs

Using Rust variables

To reference Rust variables, use 'var, as shown in the example above. var needs to implement pyo3::ToPyObject.

Re-using a Python context

It is possible to create a Context object ahead of time and use it for running the Python code. The context can be re-used for multiple invocations to share global variables across macro calls.

let c = Context::new();

c.run(python! {
  foo = 5
});

c.run(python! {
  assert foo == 5
});

As a shortcut, you can assign a python!{} invocation directly to a variable of type Context to create a new context and run the Python code in it.

let c: Context = python! {
  foo = 5
};

c.run(python! {
  assert foo == 5
});

Getting information back

A Context object could also be used to pass information back to Rust, as you can retrieve the global Python variables from the context through Context::get.

let c: Context = python! {
  foo = 5
};

assert_eq!(c.get::<i32>("foo"), 5);

Syntax issues

Since the Rust tokenizer will tokenize the Python code, some valid Python code is rejected. The main things to remember are:

• Use double quoted strings ("") instead of single quoted strings ('').

  (Single quoted strings only work if they contain a single character, since in Rust, 'a' is a character literal.)

• Use //-comments instead of #-comments.

  (If you use # comments, the Rust tokenizer will try to tokenize your comment, and complain if your comment doesn't tokenize properly.)

• Write f "" instead of f"".

  (String literals with prefixes, like f"", are reserved in Rust for future use. You can write f "" instead, which is automatically converted back to to f"".)

Other minor things that don't work are:

• The // and //= operators are unusable, as they start a comment.

  Workaround: you can write ## instead, which is automatically converted to //.

• Certain escape codes in string literals. (Specifically: \a, \b, \f, \v, \N{..}, \123 (octal escape codes), \u, and \U.)

  These, however, are accepted just fine: \\, \n, \t, \r, \xAB (hex escape codes), and \0.

• Raw string literals with escaped double quotes. (E.g. r"...\"...".)

• Triple-quoted byte- and raw-strings with content that would not be valid as a regular string. And the same for raw-byte and raw-format strings. (E.g. b"""\xFF""", r"""\z""", fr"\z", br"\xFF".)

Everything else should work fine.