Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, James T. Dennis wrote:
>> Tonight I discovered something odd in the __doc__ for tempfile
>> as shipped with Python 2.4.4 and 2.5: it says:
>>
>> This module also provides some data items to the user:
>>
>> TMP_MAX - maximum number of names that will be tried before
>> giving up.
>> template - the default prefix for all temporary names.
>> You may change this to control the default prefix.
>>
>> ... which would lead one to think that the following code would work:
>>
>> >>> import tempfile
>> >>> tempfile.template = 'mytest'
>> >>> tf = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile()
>> >>> tf.name
>> '/tmp/mytest-XXXXXX'
>>
>> It doesn't.
> The source says:
> __all__ = [
> "NamedTemporaryFile", "TemporaryFile", # high level safe interfaces
> "mkstemp", "mkdtemp", # low level safe interfaces
> "mktemp", # deprecated unsafe interface
> "TMP_MAX", "gettempprefix", # constants
> "tempdir", "gettempdir"
> ]
> Maybe the doc should be clearer in saying "constants" too.
>> Secondly, the author(s) of the tempfile module apparently didn't
>> understand this either. And no one else even noticed that the __doc__
>> is wrong (or at least misleading -- since the only way I can see to
>> change tempfile.template is to edit the .py file!
> You can change it by simply assigning to the name:
> In [15]: tempfile.template = 'spam'
> In [16]: tempfile.template
> Out[16]: 'spam'
I know you can change it. But changing it in your namespace
doesn't change the results returned by the functions called
from the module.
> If you want to change the outcome of the functions and objects then simply
> give the prefix as argument.
I know how to provide the prefix arguments and that was
never the issue.
The issue was twofold:
The docs are wrong (or at least confusing/misleading)
I don't quite understand how this name/variable in
my namespace (__main__) is able to change the value
while the functions in the module still hold the old
value.
--
Jim Dennis,
Starshine: Signed, Sealed, Delivered
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