On 21.10.18 08:13, boB Stepp wrote:
Use case: I want to allow a user of my Solitaire Scorekeeper program
to be able to give any name he wants to each game of solitaire he
wishes to record. My thought for permanent storage of each game's
parameters is to use a dictionary to map the user-chosen game names to
a unique json filename. This way I hope no shenanigans can occur with
weird characters/non-printing characters.
My initial thought was to just have a sequence of game names with
incrementing numerical suffixes: game_0, game_1, ... , game_n. But
this would require the program to keep track of what the next
available numerical suffix is. Additionally, if a user chooses to
delete a game, then there would be a gap in the numerical sequence of
the game filenames. I find such a gap aesthetically displeasing and
would probably go to additional efforts to reuse such deleted
filenames, so there would be no such "gaps".
So I am now wondering if using
tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(delete=False) would solve this problem
nicely? As I am not very familiar with this library, are there any
unforeseen issues I should be made aware of? Would this work equally
well on all operating systems?
TIA!
This sounds like a good though surprising use case. The only odd thing
about this is the misleading name then of the function, plus there is
the (vague) possibility that the stdlib module might evolve and no
longer support this undocumented (given that the first sentence in the
module description reads: "This module creates temporary files and
directories.") use case.
I would probably address these issues and the handling of the dir
parameter via a partial function like this:
from functools import partial
SavedGameFile = partial(
tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile, dir=my_saved_games_dir
) # if you like also set the suffix here
SavedGameFile.__doc__ = """\
Create and return a saved game file, ...
"""
This way you have a good name for the function, and you can redefine the
function, if you ever want/need to move away from NamedTemporaryFile,
without having to rewrite every function call.
Wolfgang
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