You can use future to help to port your code from Python 2 to Python 3 today -- and still have it run on Python 2.

If you already have Python 3 code, you can instead use :mod:`future` to offer Python 2 compatibility with almost no extra work.

To install the latest stable version, type:

pip install future

If you would prefer the latest development version, it is available here.

Start each module with these lines:

from __future__ import (absolute_import, division,
                        print_function, unicode_literals)
from future import standard_library
from future.builtins import *

Then write standard Python 3 code. The :mod:`future` package will provide support for running your code on Python 2.6 and 2.7 mostly unchanged.

See :ref:`what-else` for more details.

To offer backward compatibility with Python 2, you can use the futurize script with the --from3 parameter. This adds these lines at the top of each module:

from __future__ import (absolute_import, division,
                        print_function, unicode_literals)
from future import standard_library
from future.builtins import *

and converts a few Python 3-only constructs to a form compatible with both Py3 and Py2. Most remaining Python 3 code should simply work on Python 2.

For a realistic example, you can see the included backported http.client module, and look at the diff between this and the Python 3.3 module (e.g. /usr/lib/python3.3/http/client.py).

See :ref:`backwards-conversion` for more details.

If you already know Python 3, start with the :ref:`automatic-conversion` page.

:mod:`future` supports the standard library reorganization (PEP 3108) via import hooks, allowing almost all moved standard library modules to be accessed under their Python 3 names and locations in Python 2:

from future import standard_library

import socketserver
import queue
import configparser
import test.support
import html.parser
from collections import UserList
from itertools import filterfalse, zip_longest
from http.client import HttpConnection
# and other moved modules and definitions

:mod:`future` also includes backports for these stdlib modules from Py3 that were heavily refactored versus Py2:

import html
import html.entities
import html.parser

import http
import http.client
import http.server

These modules are currently not supported, but we aim to support them in the future:

import http.cookies
import http.cookiejar

import urllib
import urllib.parse
import urllib.request
import urllib.error

If you need one of these, please open an issue here.

For more information on interfaces that have changed in the standard library between Python 2 and Python 3, see :ref:`stdlib-incompatibilities`.

:mod:`future` also provides some useful functions and decorators to ease backward compatibility with Py2 in the :mod:`future.utils` module. These are a selection of the most useful functions from six and various home-grown Py2/3 compatibility modules from various Python projects, such as Jinja2, Pandas, IPython, and Django.

Examples:

# Functions like print() expect __str__ on Py2 to return a byte
# string. This decorator maps the __str__ to __unicode__ on Py2 and
# defines __str__ to encode it as utf-8:

from future.utils import python_2_unicode_compatible

@python_2_unicode_compatible
class MyClass(object):
    def __str__(self):
        return u'Unicode string: \u5b54\u5b50'
a = MyClass()

# This then prints the Chinese characters for Confucius:
print(a)


# Iterators on Py3 require a __next__() method, whereas on Py2 this
# is called next(). This decorator allows Py3-style iterators to work
# identically on Py2:

@implements_iterator
class Upper(object):
    def __init__(self, iterable):
        self._iter = iter(iterable)
    def __next__(self):                 # note the Py3 interface
        return next(self._iter).upper()
    def __iter__(self):
        return self

print(list(Upper('hello')))
# prints ['H', 'E', 'L', 'L', 'O']

On Python 3 these decorators are no-ops.

For more information, see :ref:`what-else`.