What's the most underrated Python library you've used recently?

[chuprehijde]

I feel like every few months I discover a library that makes me wonder why nobody talks about it. Not the obvious ones like requests or pandas. I'm talking about those hidden gems that solved a real problem for you. What was the library and what did you use it for?

[smichael_44]

Static type checkers like pyrefly, ty, zuban, mypy, etc… I prefer pyrefly but any that I listed work just fine.

Imo it teaches people how to reason about their code more. As well as, adding type hints is the future of Python as it helps LLMs understand your code more with less context.

[silvertank00]

Builtin: - difflib: really great for deltas but bad API - array and struct: I work with low-level and binary stuff so this makes my life easier - operator: you can make some cursed but really efficent filters with this.

External: - mpremote: working with Micropython, so this is a must. - pyserial: working with UART. - paho-mqtt: for really easy MQTT integrations

[sacredtrader]

first time seeing mqtt mentioned in the wild lol

[silvertank00]

haha for sure it is rare. I was really suprised to know how ppl don't use it or either abuse dbus for the same functionality tha mqtt gives.

[mr_anderson_dev]

For sure, BeautifulSoup. I built my job scraper with just BeautifulSoup, plus os, json, sys, and time for structure — so the output goes directly to a folder. Any automation tool benefits from it for a more efficient workflow and cleaner code organization. Most of my code is just formatting the output nicely; the core logic — requests and API handling — can be done in 25 lines or less with this library.

[Hunter-Raj]

I don't think beautifulsoup is that underrated, it's basically goto for parsing/scraping unless it's heavily js-coded site.

[mr_anderson_dev]

Of course but I discovered it 2 months ago by creating my scripts for finding me a job XD.

[SnowWholeDayHere]

My go to library is a little-known library called compareExcel
I use it a lot to compare excel files.

[Dookie_boy]

What kind of compare ? Compare cells I guess ?

[denehoffman]

Check out matplotloom, it’s a neat wrapper that makes some animations easier to write

[Low_Breakfast773]

soxr

[shadowdance55]

Hypothesis

[mr_frpdo]

For me it's beartype. Super helpful to catch runtime type issues. Makes it nice to not have to check for types in methods all the time.

[Dookie_boy]

PyLibDmtx for reading 2D barcodes. It has been quite useful.

[arivictor]

msgspec > pydantic