py2dot

Two of my recent obsessions have been the standard library 'compiler' module and the Graphviz graph visualization software. To scratch these two itches, I wrote py2dot, a simple script for displaying Python ASTs. Here's a visualization of a 'factorial' function (click on the images for full-size versions):

py2dot is easy to use. Here's how I generated the above image:

andy:mitya:~/py2dot$ py2dot --reduce -o - factorial.py | dot -Tpng -ofactorial.png

The '--reduce' option makes the output graph smaller by partially evaluating expressions containing only 'scalar' values and pruning the child nodes. Here's py2dot's usage message:

usage: py2dot.py [options] FILE

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o FILE, --output-file=FILE
                        write output to FILE (- for stdout (default))
  -r, --reduce-graph    reduce the AST
  -l, --lineno          print line numbers
  -b, --black-and-white
                        output in black and white

Here's the same factorial function, without the reduce option, and with line numbers displayed. Note the substantially larger tree:

You can download py2dot here [ colorized source ].py2dot requires Graphviz and Python 2.4.

py2dot is only hours old, so there's inefficiencies and bugs, to be sure. If you find them, please report them here. I have some new features I'll be adding as I find time, such as a profiler function for generating call graphs.