API Notes

pygraphviz-1.2

No API changes

pygraphviz-1.1

Pygraphviz-1.1 adds unicode (graphviz charset) support. The default Node type is now unicode. See examples/utf8.py for an example of how to use non-ASCII characters.

The __str__ and __repr__ methods have been rewritten and a __unicode__ method added.

If G is a pygraphviz.AGraph object then

  • str(G) produces a dot-format string representation (some characters might not be represented correctly)
  • unicode(G) produces a dot-format unicode representation
  • repr(G) produces a string of the unicode representation.
  • print G produces a formatted dot language output

pygraphivz-0.32

pygraphviz-0.32 is a rewrite of pygraphviz-0.2x with some significant changes in the API and Graphviz wrapper. It is not compatible with with earlier versions.

The goal of pygraphviz is to provide a (mostly) Pythonic interface to the Graphviz Agraph data-structure, layout, and drawing algorithms.

The API is now similar to the NetworkX API. Studying the documentation and Tutorial for NetworkX will teach you most of what you need to know for pygraphviz. For a short introduction on pygraphviz see the pygraphviz Tutorial.

There are some important differences between the PyGraphviz and NetworkX API. With PyGraphviz

  • All nodes must be of string or unicode type. An attempt will be made to convert other types to a string.
  • Nodes and edges are custom Python objects. Nodes are like unicode/string objects and edges are like tuple objects. (In NetworkX nodes can be anything and edges are two- or three-tuples.)
  • Graphs, edges, and nodes may have attributes such as color, size, shape, attached to them. If the attributes are known Graphviz attributes they will be used for drawing and layout.
  • The layout() and draw() methods allow positioning of nodes and rendering in all of the supported Graphviz output formats.
  • The string() method produces a string with the graph represented in Graphviz dot format. See also from_string().
  • The subgraph() method is the Graphviz representation of subgraphs: a tree of graphs under the original (root) graph. The are primarily used for clustering of nodes when drawing with dot.

Pygraphviz supports most of the Graphviz API.