A CLI tool to automatically add type annotations into Python code.
The main scenario for using the tool is to help you with annotating a big and old codebase. It won't solve the task for you 100% but will definitely help you tremendously, because many of the functions in the real world have quite simple return types that are easy to infer automatically.
Features:
- 100% automated, get a bunch of type annotations with no effort.
- 100% static, all types are inferred without running the code.
- A lot of heuristics and smart inference.
- Actively uses typeshed to find annotations for unannotated dependencies.
Let's say, you have the following method:
class Database:
def users_count(self):
return len(self.users)
Since len
always returns int
, infer-types
is able to infer the return type of the method. So, after running the tool, the code will look like this:
class Database:
def users_count(self) -> int:
return len(self.users)
python3 -m pip install infer-types
python3 -m infer_types ./example/
The tool will add new import statements that can be duplicated and are located not at the top of the file. To fix it, run isort:
python3 -m isort ./example/
The infer-types tool uses the new fancy syntax for type annotations introduced in Python 3.10. So, instead of Optional[str]
it will emit str | None
. If your code is supposed to run on an older version of Python, add from __future__ import annotations
at the beginning of each file. It will solve the issue and also make startup of your app faster. You can also do that with isort:
python3 -m isort --add-import 'from __future__ import annotations' ./example/
See awesome-python-typing for more tools to help you with annotating your code.
- Most of heuristics live in astypes package. Check it out learn more about the main inference logic.
- If the same method is defined in a base class, copy the type annotations from there.
- If there are no return statements returning a value, the return type is
None
. - If there is a
yield
statement, the return type istyping.Iterator
. - In some cases, the return type can be guessed from the function name. For example,
is_open
function is assumed to returnbool
because it starts withis_
.
You can run only a specific heuristic using the --only
flag.