characteristic: Python attributes without boilerplate.
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``characteristic`` is an `MIT <http://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/>`_-licensed Python package with class decorators that ease the chores of implementing the most common attribute-related object protocols.

You just specify the attributes to work with and ``characteristic`` gives you any or all of:

- a nice human-readable ``__repr__``,
- a complete set of comparison methods,
- immutability for attributes,
- and a kwargs-based initializer (that cooperates with your existing one and optionally even checks the types of the arguments)

*without* writing dull boilerplate code again and again.

This gives you the power to use actual classes with actual types in your code instead of confusing ``tuple``\ s or confusingly behaving ``namedtuple``\ s.

So put down that type-less data structures and welcome some class into your life!

``characteristic``\ ’s documentation lives at `Read the Docs <https://characteristic.readthedocs.org/>`_, the code on `GitHub <https://github.com/hynek/characteristic>`_.
It’s rigorously tested on Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.3+, and PyPy.


Authors
-------

``characteristic`` is written and maintained by `Hynek Schlawack <https://hynek.me/>`_.

The development is kindly supported by `Variomedia AG <https://www.variomedia.de/>`_.

It’s inspired by Twisted’s `FancyEqMixin <http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/api/twisted.python.util.FancyEqMixin.html>`_ but is implemented using class decorators because `sub-classing is bad for you <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MNVP9-hglc>`_, m’kay?


The following folks helped forming ``characteristic`` into what it is now:

- `Adam Dangoor <https://github.com/adamtheturtle>`_
- `Glyph <https://github.com/glyph>`_
- `Itamar Turner-Trauring <https://github.com/itamarst>`_
- `Jean-Paul Calderone <https://github.com/exarkun>`_
- `Julian Berman <https://github.com/julian>`_
- `Richard Wall <https://github.com/wallrj>`_