Flatland maps between rich, structured Python application data and the string-oriented flat namespace of web forms, key/value stores, text files and user input. Flatland provides a schema-driven mapping toolkit with optional data validation.

Flatland is great for:

• Collecting, validating, re-displaying and processing HTML form data
• Dealing with rich structures (lists, dicts, lists of dicts, etc.) in web data
• Validating JSON, YAML, and other structured formats
• Associating arbitrary Python types with JSON, .ini, or sys.argv members that would otherwise deserialize as simple strings.
• Reusing a single data schema for HTML, JSON apis, RPC, ...

The core of the flatland toolkit is a flexible and extensible declarative schema system representing many data types and structures.

A validation system and library of schema-aware validators is also provided, with rich i18n capabilities for use in HTML, network APIs and other environments where user-facing messaging is required.

flatland0 is a fork of flatland written by Jason Kirtland and currently under development.

There is currently ongoing work of porting all test cases from nose to py.test to simplify their structure and get working Python3 support based on that. Currently, 675/716 test cases are run on Python3 and the library is usable, but should be considered beta quality when not running on Python2.