pydifact

A Python library to parse and serialize UN/EDIFACT interchanges.

Preamble

This is a port of metroplex-systems/edifact to Python. Thanks here at the start to Craig Duncan for this cool piece of software. Porting was like a breeze due to the high code quality there. All credits for the initial code here go to him, I just did the translation to Python(3), some "pythonifications" of the code and little improvements.

Why another EDIFACT library?

Because I did not find a decent UN/EDIFACT library for Python, so I decided to port one of the available good PHP libraries to Python. Here is the result.

ATM this is a Work In Progress, the API is not stable yet. Feel free to help.

Usage

To read a message from a file or from a string, take the SegmentsCollection class and iter over the segments:

from pydifact.segmentcollection import SegmentCollection
collection = SegmentCollection.from_file("./tests/data/order.edi")
collection = SegmentCollection.from_str("UNA:+,? 'UNH+1+ORDERS:D:96A:UN:EAN008'")

for segment in collection.segments:
    print('Segment tag: {}, content: {}'.format(
        segment.tag, segment.elements))

Or you can create an EDI inerchange on he fly:

from pydifact.segmentcollection import SegmentCollection
from pydifact.segments import Segment
collection = SegmentCollection()
collection.add_segment(Segment('QTY', ['12', '3']))
print(collection.serialize())

Limitations

• No support of high-level EDIFACT containers : Interchange (UNA+UNB→UNZ), Messages (UNH/UNT), and optional functional groups (UNG→UNE),
• No support for data encoded with something else than ISO-8859

Alternatives

In python ecosystem:

• python-edifact - simpler, IMHO less cleaner code, less flexible. may be faster though (not tested). Seems unmaintained.
• bots - huge, with webinterface (bots-monitor), webserver, bots-engine.
• edicat - simple, only for separating lines/segments for CLI-piping.

Development

To develop pydifact, install the dev requirements with pipenv install --dev. This installs all python packages needed for development and testing.

Format all python files using black.

Happy coding, PR are more than welcome to make this library better, or to add a feature that matches your needs. Nevertheless, don't forget adding tests for every aspect you add in code.

Testing

pydifact uses pytest for testing. Just exec pytest within the project folder to execute the unit tests.

There is one test to check the performance of parsing huge files, named test_huge_message - you can skip that test by calling

pytest --ignore tests/test_huge_message.py

This is recommended for fast testing.

License

This library is licensed under the MIT license, see the LICENSE file.