[Python-Dev] Can't have unbuffered text I/O in Python 3.0? (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sat Dec 20 00:03:10 CET 2008

Fror truly unbuffered text output you'd have to make changes to the io.TextIOWrapper class to flush after each write() call. That's an API change -- the constructor currently has a line_buffering option but no option for completely unbuffered mode. It would also require some changes to io.open() which currently rejects buffering=0 in text mode. All that suggests that it should wait until 3.1.

However it might make sense to at least turn on line buffering when -u or PYTHONUNBUFFERED is given; that doesn't require API changes and so can be considered a bug fix.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 2:47 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

Well, python -h still lists it. Precisely, it says: -u : unbuffered binary stdout and stderr; also PYTHONUNBUFFERED=x see man page for details on internal buffering relating to '-u' Note the "binary". And indeed: ./python -u Python 3.1a0 (py3k:67839M, Dec 18 2008, 17:56:54) [GCC 4.3.2] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

import sys sys.stdout.buffer.write(b"y") y1

I don't know what it would take to enable unbuffered text IO while keeping the current TextIOWrapper implementation... Regards Antoine.

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