On Tue, 01 Jan 2008 12:59:44 -0700, Steven Bethard wrote: > Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> On Tue, 01 Jan 2008 13:36:57 +0100, Diez B. Roggisch wrote: >> >>> And codemonkeys know that in python >>> >>> doc = et.parse(StringIO(string)) >>> >>> is just one import away >> >> Yes, but to play devil's advocate for a moment, >> >> doc = et.parse(string_or_file) >> >> would be even simpler. > > I assume the problem with this is that it would be ambiguous. You can > already use either a string or a file with ``et.parse``. A string is > interpreted as a file name, while a file object is used directly. Ah! I wasn't aware that parse() operated on either an open file object or a string file name. That's an excellent reason for not treating strings the same as files in ElementTree.
> How would you differentiate between a string that's supposed to be a > file name, and a string that's supposed to be XML? Well, naturally I wouldn't. I *could*, if I assumed that a multi-line string that started with "<" was XML, and a single-line string with the path separator character or ending in ".xml" was a file name, but that sort of Do What I Mean coding is foolish in a library function that can't afford to occasionally Do The Wrong Thing. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
