enum

.. Important:: Superseded by Python standard library.

Python 3 now has in its standard library an `enum`_
implementation (also available for older Python versions as
the third-party `enum34`_ distribution) that supersedes this
library.

..  _enum: https://docs.python.org/3/library/enum.html
..  _enum34: https://pypi.org/project/enum34/

This package provides a module for robust enumerations in Python.

An enumeration object is created with a sequence of string arguments to the Enum() constructor::

>>> from enum import Enum
>>> Colours = Enum('red', 'blue', 'green')
>>> Weekdays = Enum('mon', 'tue', 'wed', 'thu', 'fri', 'sat', 'sun')

The return value is an immutable sequence object with a value for each of the string arguments. Each value is also available as an attribute named from the corresponding string argument::

>>> pizza_night = Weekdays[4]
>>> shirt_colour = Colours.green

The values are constants that can be compared only with values from the same enumeration; comparison with other values will invoke Python's fallback comparisons::

>>> pizza_night == Weekdays.fri
True
>>> shirt_colour > Colours.red
True
>>> shirt_colour == "green"
False

Each value from an enumeration exports its sequence index as an integer, and can be coerced to a simple string matching the original arguments used to create the enumeration::

>>> str(pizza_night)
'fri'
>>> shirt_colour.index
2