Hi, Chris Mellon wrote: > On that note, I really don't like APIs that take either a file name or > a file object - I can open my own files, thanks.
... and HTTP URLs, and FTP URLs. In lxml, there is a performance difference between passing an open file (which is read in Python space using the read() method) and passing a file name or URL, which is passed on to libxml2 (and thus doesn't require the GIL at parse time). That's only one reason why I like APIs that allow me to pass anything that points to a file - be it an open file object, a local file path or a URL - and they just Do The Right Thing with it. I find that totally pythonic. > open(fname) is even shorter than StringIO(somedata). It doesn't serve the same purpose, though. > My take on the API decision in question was always that a file is > inherently an XML *document*, while a string is inherently an XML > *fragment*. Not inherently, no. I know some people who do web processing with an XML document coming in as a string (from an HTTP request) and a result XML document going out as a string. I don't think that's an uncommon use case. Stefan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
