Message 56757 - Python tracker (original) (raw)

2007/10/25, Yitz Gale <report@bugs.python.org>:

I was actually bitten badly by this issue with StringIO. I added fileinput only as an afterthought.

In an xml.sax app, I needed seek() support for a codec-wrapped file handle, so I over-wrapped it with StringIO. The result was that I had to refactor code all over the place to handle StringIO as a special case. What a mess!

I don't understand. What did your code look like after the refactoring?

I find that typically a useful idiom is to have one piece of code handle opening/closing of streams and let the rest of the code just deal with streams without ever closing them. E.g.

f = open(filename) try: process(f) finally: f.close()

or, if you want:

with open(filename) as f: process(f)

As I don't understand how you are working the StringIO() call into this I'm still not sure what the issue is.

Why is this getting over-excited? It's a very lightweight change. You can't beat the cost/benefit ratio.

Until you submit a patch it's more work for me. :-)