Is there a way to use StrEnum in earlier python versions?

Question

The enum package in python 3.11 has the StrEnum class. I consider it very convenient but cannot use it in python 3.10. What would be the easiest method to use this class anyway?

Answer 1

On Python 3.10, you can inherit from str and Enum to have a StrEnum:

from enum import Enum


class MyEnum(str, Enum):
    choice1 = "choice1"
    choice2 = "choice2"

With this approach, you have string comparison:

"choice1" == MyEnum.choice1
>> True

Be aware, however, that Python 3.11 makes a breaking change to classes which inherit from (str, Enum): https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/100458. You will have to change all instances of (str, Enum) to StrEnum when upgrading to maintain the same behavior.

Or:

you can execute pip install StrEnum and have this:

from strenum import StrEnum


class MyEnum(StrEnum):
    choice1 = "choice1"
    choice2 = "choice2"

Answer 2

There is also backports.strenum which copies the standard library implementation from 3.11 and makes it available to Python >=3.8.6. You might want this instead of https://pypi.org/project/StrEnum/ if you intend to switch to the standard library version for Python >= 3.11, as it should be drop-in compatible.

Note that backports.strenum enforces Python <3.11, so you need to specify a conditional dependency like this:

"backports.strenum (>=1.3.1,<2.0) ; python_version < '3.11'"

You can then import like this to automatically use the standard library version if available:

try:
    from enum import StrEnum
except ImportError:
    from backports.strenum import StrEnum