[Python-Dev] Incorrect documentation of the raw_input built-in function (original) (raw)

Mike Kent mike.kent at sage.com
Thu Jan 24 20:41:46 CET 2008

<skip pobox.com> writes:

Isaac> Have people actually verified that the prompt is really sent to Isaac> stderr right now by using 2>/dev/null to attempt to suppress it? Good point. On my machine at work (Solaris), Python 2.4 seems to send its rawinput prompt to stdout, not stderr:

Same for 2.6a0 on my Mac at home. Mike, are you sure about it prompting to stderr? If so, what's your setup? Skip

Skip, Guido and others:

Interesting point about whether GNU readline is installed. My setup is RedHat Linux, with Python 2.5 that I built and installed myself. GNU readline is not, in fact, installed. If you look at Python2.5/Parser/myreadline.c, function PyOS_StdioReadline, line 125, you will see that prompt output is being sent to stderr. As best as my Python-fu can determine, this is the code used to output a raw_input prompt (thanks again to Gabriel Genellina for pointing me in the right direction.)

It's entirely likely that the difference in what I am seeing and what you guys are seeing is caused by my not having GNU readline installed. Nevertheless, the behavior without it seems wrong, and is certainly different from the documentation.

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