GeneralTools is a set of functions designed to help working with any kind of digital data and (data) files.

There are currently two different pseudo classes in GeneralTools, which are stand-alone (they do not depend on each other): HandyTools and DataTools. The class PyQtInformationDialog is only useful when developing GUIs with PyQt. Please ignore it if this is not your case.

There is no pip install option (yet). Just clone this repository to a directory of your choice on your computer. In order to use these classes, the Python session must know the paths to the directories on your machine. Hence you need to tell Python where to look. If you use a Python startup file the following paths need to be appended to the sys.path variable:

sys.path.append ('/SomeWhereOnYourMachine/GeneralTools/DataTools')
sys.path.append ('/SomeWhereOnYourMachine/GeneralTools/PYtoCPP/DataTools')
sys.path.append ('/SomeWhereOnYourMachine/GeneralTools/HandyTools')
sys.path.append ('/SomeWhereOnYourMachine/GeneralTools/PyQtInformationDialog')

If you run Python straight from the command line, then on a Mac you need to add the following lines to .zprofile (or .bashrc or similar):

export PYTHONPATH="/SomeWhereOnYourMachine/GeneralTools/DataTools:$PYTHONPATH"
export PYTHONPATH="/SomeWhereOnYourMachine/GeneralTools/PYtoCPP/DataTools:$PYTHONPATH"
export PYTHONPATH="/SomeWhereOnYourMachine/GeneralTools/HandyTools:$PYTHONPATH"
export PYTHONPATH="/SomeWhereOnYourMachine/GeneralTools/PyQtInformationDialog:$PYTHONPATH"

HandyTools is written in Python only. It is a collection of small functions, that are ... well handy (at least they are for me). I developed them over the years, while working on different projects. This set is pretty stable and I do not make many updates or changes to it.

DataTools is written in Python and some of the functions have C++ bindings, via Cython. This is a more recent class and I am more actively adding and updating the code. For example the filter functions are still rather rudimentary, with only one simpe filter written in C++. The Cython and C++ code and the compiled libraries are in the ./PYtoCPP/DataTools subfolder. The compilation has been done for Python 3.11 (both Mac OS and Windows), which I use on my machine. On Mac, it might be necessary to have XCode installed before you can run it. If you use a different version of Python, then you must compile the two classes DataWranglingToolsPYtoCPP and FilterToolsPYtoCPP using

> cd /SomeWhereOnYourMachine/GeneralTools/PYtoCPP/DataTools
> python DataWranglingToolsPYtoCPP_setup.py build_ext --inplace
> python FilterToolsPYtoCPP_setup.py build_ext --inplace

Note that you might have to install Cython and/or some other compilers (and/or XCode on Mac) before you can compile, it depends on your computer's setup, and Python distribution and packages.

Please find the documentation on how to use GeneralTools here.