Akshay's Blog

Type hinting and Mypy

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Python is dynamic typed language, but static type variable can be possible if we use type annotations. Python 3.5 and later versions have functionality of type hinting. Though It is completely optional.

Type hinting is useful for testing purpose in CI. It does not change code to static variable; but it make easy to understand code that you have written long time ago.

Simple example of type hinting:

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>>> number: int = 10
>>> name: str = "Akshay"

Let’s see following funtion,

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# file.py

def addme(a: int, b: int) -> int:
    return a + b

addme(5, 10)

Above code indicate that addme() takes 2 integer parameters (a and b) and returns int value. -> symbol shows return value type.

Mypy

Mypy is a static type checker. To install it from PyPI run:

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$ pip3 install mypy

Once Mypy is installed, we can check types using following command,

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$ mypy file.py

There is no any output if types are correct as per type annotations given in code.

In an example of addme(), if we change to addme(4, "a") and run mypy. It shows error as,

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$ mypy file.py
file.py:4: error: Argument 2 to "addme" has incompatible type "str"; expected "int"

Type hinting for List, Dict and Tuple

For this we need to import the following:

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from typing import Tuple, Dict, List

Let’s look at an example of type hinting for List, Dict and Tuple,

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# list name foobar and all the items in the list are int type
foobar: List[int] = [2, 3]

# Similarly for Dict and Tuple
alpha: Dict[int, str] = {1: "a"}
beta: Tuple[int, str, float] = (1, "text", 3.6)
  1. www.mypy-lang.org
  2. pyre-check.org (Another Type checher)
  3. MonkeyType: System for Python that genarate static type annotations
  4. Python typing library
  5. The talk about type checking