Python replacements for functions that are part of the IDL built-in library, or part of astronomical IDL libraries. The emphasis is on reproducing results of the astronomical library functions. Only the bare minimum of IDL built-in functions are implemented to support this.

There are four astronomical IDL libraries targeted:

• idlutils
• Goddard utilities (which are distributed with idlutils)
• idlspec2d : tools for working with SDSS/BOSS spectroscopic data
• photoop : tools for working with SDSS imaging data

This package affiliated with the astropy project and is registered with PyPI.

This code was initially developed on the SDSS-III svn repository. It was moved to the new GitHub repository on 2013-03-06. The present location of the repository is http://github.com/weaverba137/pydl .