I have a text file /etc/default/foo which contains one line:
FOO="/path/to/foo"
In my python script, I need to reference the variable FOO.
What is the simplest way to "source" the file /etc/default/foo into my python script, same as I would do in bash?
. /etc/default/foo
Same answer as #jil however, that answer is specific to some historical version of Python.
In modern Python (3.x):
exec(open('filename').read())
replaces execfile('filename') from 2.x
You could use execfile:
execfile("/etc/default/foo")
But please be aware that this will evaluate the contents of the file as is into your program source. It is potential security hazard unless you can fully trust the source.
It also means that the file needs to be valid python syntax (your given example file is).
Keep in mind that if you have a "text" file with this content that has a .py as the file extension, you can always do:
import mytextfile
print(mytestfile.FOO)
Of course, this assumes that the text file is syntactically correct as far as Python is concerned. On a project I worked on we did something similar to this. Turned some text files into Python files. Wacky but maybe worth consideration.
Just to give a different approach, note that if your original file is setup as
export FOO=/path/to/foo
You can do source /etc/default/foo; python myprogram.py (or . /etc/default/foo; python myprogram.py) and within myprogram.py all the values that were exported in the sourced' file are visible in os.environ, e.g
import os
os.environ["FOO"]
If you know for certain that it only contains VAR="QUOTED STRING" style variables, like this:
FOO="some value"
Then you can just do this:
>>> with open('foo.sysconfig') as fd:
... exec(fd.read())
Which gets you:
>>> FOO
'some value'
(This is effectively the same thing as the execfile() solution
suggested in the other answer.)
This method has substantial security implications; if instead of FOO="some value" your file contained:
os.system("rm -rf /")
Then you would be In Trouble.
Alternatively, you can do this:
>>> with open('foo.sysconfig') as fd:
... settings = {var: shlex.split(value) for var, value in [line.split('=', 1) for line in fd]}
Which gets you a dictionary settings that has:
>>> settings
{'FOO': ['some value']}
That settings = {...} line is using a dictionary comprehension. You could accomplish the same thing in a few more lines with a for loop and so forth.
And of course if the file contains shell-style variable expansion like ${somevar:-value_if_not_set} then this isn't going to work (unless you write your very own shell style variable parser).
There are a couple ways to do this sort of thing.
You can indeed import the file as a module, as long as the data it contains corresponds to python's syntax. But either the file in question is a .py in the same directory as your script, either you're to use imp (or importlib, depending on your version) like here.
Another solution (that has my preference) can be to use a data format that any python library can parse (JSON comes to my mind as an example).
/etc/default/foo :
{"FOO":"path/to/foo"}
And in your python code :
import json
with open('/etc/default/foo') as file:
data = json.load(file)
FOO = data["FOO"]
## ...
file.close()
This way, you don't risk to execute some uncertain code...
You have the choice, depending on what you prefer. If your data file is auto-generated by some script, it might be easier to keep a simple syntax like FOO="path/to/foo" and use imp.
Hope that it helps !
The Solution
Here is my approach: parse the bash file myself and process only variable assignment lines such as:
FOO="/path/to/foo"
Here is the code:
import shlex
def parse_shell_var(line):
"""
Parse such lines as:
FOO="My variable foo"
:return: a tuple of var name and var value, such as
('FOO', 'My variable foo')
"""
return shlex.split(line, posix=True)[0].split('=', 1)
if __name__ == '__main__':
with open('shell_vars.sh') as f:
shell_vars = dict(parse_shell_var(line) for line in f if '=' in line)
print(shell_vars)
How It Works
Take a look at this snippet:
shell_vars = dict(parse_shell_var(line) for line in f if '=' in line)
This line iterates through the lines in the shell script, only process those lines that has the equal sign (not a fool-proof way to detect variable assignment, but the simplest). Next, run those lines into the function parse_shell_var which uses shlex.split to correctly handle the quotes (or the lack thereof). Finally, the pieces are assembled into a dictionary. The output of this script is:
{'MOO': '/dont/have/a/cow', 'FOO': 'my variable foo', 'BAR': 'My variable bar'}
Here is the contents of shell_vars.sh:
FOO='my variable foo'
BAR="My variable bar"
MOO=/dont/have/a/cow
echo $FOO
Discussion
This approach has a couple of advantages:
It does not execute the shell (either in bash or in Python), which avoids any side-effect
Consequently, it is safe to use, even if the origin of the shell script is unknown
It correctly handles values with or without quotes
This approach is not perfect, it has a few limitations:
The method of detecting variable assignment (by looking for the presence of the equal sign) is primitive and not accurate. There are ways to better detect these lines but that is the topic for another day
It does not correctly parse values which are built upon other variables or commands. That means, it will fail for lines such as:
FOO=$BAR
FOO=$(pwd)
Based off the answer with exec(.read()), value = eval(.read()), it will only return the value. E.g.
1 + 1: 2
"Hello Word": "Hello World"
float(2) + 1: 3.0
Related
I have a module that I want to run on every file in a directory. However, when I iterate over that directory, using each file as an input, the module cannot find the file, as though the variable defined in the loop doesn't actually point to the file. Here is the code I am trying to execute:
import os as os
for file in os.listdir():
if file.endswith('.fasta'):
!python ../iupred2a.py file long
Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
https://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/interactive/reference.html#system-shell-access says that shell commands (for example, your line prefixed with a "!") are interpreted literally. When you type "file", it sees "file", not the value of your file variable.
Any input line beginning with a ! character is passed verbatim (minus the !, of course) to the underlying operating system.
But it also says you can use braces or a dollar sign to "expand" a value.
IPython also allows you to expand the value of python variables when making system calls. Wrap variables or expressions in {braces}:
In [1]: pyvar = 'Hello world'
In [2]: !echo "A python variable: {pyvar}"
A python variable: Hello world
In [3]: import math
In [4]: x = 8
In [5]: !echo {math.factorial(x)}
40320
For simple cases, you can alternatively prepend $ to a variable name:
In [6]: !echo $sys.argv
[/home/fperez/usr/bin/ipython]
In [7]: !echo "A system variable: $$HOME" # Use $$ for literal $
A system variable: /home/fperez
In your case, try !python ../iupred2a.py $file long or !python ../iupred2a.py {file} long.
... All that said, I think it would be better to just import your other Python file and call its functions directly. This may require a little redesigning, because importing from a file from one directory up is somewhat tricky, and the command-line interface for a module is usually different from its programming interface.
If you can get your current file and iupred2a.py into the same directory, and figure out the name of the function that you actually want to call, then your code would end up looking something like:
import os
import iupred2a as iup
for file in os.listdir():
if file.endswith('.fasta'):
iup.do_the_thing(file, mode="long")
I have a python script that successfully sends SOAP to insert a record into a system. The values are static in the test. I need to make the value dynamic/argument that is passed through the command line or other stored value.
execute: python myscript.py
<d4p1:Address>MainStreet</d4p1:Address> ....this works to add hard coded "MainStreet"
execute: python myscript.py MainStreet
...this is now trying to pass the argument MainStreet
<d4p1:Address>sys.argv[1]</d4p1:Address> ....this does not work
It saves the literal text address as "sys.argv[1]" ... I have imported sys ..I have tried %, {}, etc from web searches, what syntax am I missing??
You need to read a little about how to create strings in Python, below is how it could look like in your code. Sorry it's hard to say more without seeing your actual code. And you actually shouldn't create XMLs like that, you should use for instance xml module from standard library.
test = "<d4p1:Address>" + sys.argv[1] + "</d4p1:Address>"
So I'm using approach in this post
to extract a double quoted string from a string. If the input string comes from terminal argument, it works fine. But if the input string comes from a txt file like the following, it gives nontype error. I tried to get the hash code for two strings(one from file and one from terminal) with identical txt content, and turns out they are different. I'm curious if anyone knows how to solve this?(in Python 3.x)
That said, I have set the default encoding to "utf-8" in my code.
python filename.py < input.txt
If you are using command python, the command recognize it to python 2.x.
If you want python 3.x, just change the command to python3
like this
python3 filename.py < input.txt
Two things, if you want to ingest a txt file into a python script, you need to specify it. Add these two lines
import sys
text = str(sys.argv[1])
this mean text would be your 'input.txt'.
Second, if your script has only a function, it would not know what you want to do with the function, you have to either, tell the script explicity to execute the function through the entry main
import re
import sys
def doit(text):
matches=re.findall(r'\"(.+?)\"',text)
# matches is now ['String 1', 'String 2', 'String3']
return ",".join(matches)
if __name__ == '__main__':
text_file = str(sys.argv[1])
text = open(text_file).read()
print(doit(text))
Alternately, you can just execute line by line without wrapping the re in a function, since it is only one line.
I just figure it out, the bug doesn't come from my code. I had the "smart quotes" enabled on my Mac so whenever it reads a quote, it's identified as a special character. Disable this under keyboard setting would do the trick.
LOL what a "bug".
I am creating a simple file in python to reorganize some text data I grabbed from a website. I put the data in a .txt file and then want to use the "tail" command to get rid of the first 5 lines. I'm able to make this work for a simple filename shown below, but when I try to change the filename (to what I'd actually like it to be) I get an error. My code:
start = 2010
end = 2010
for i in range(start,end+1)
year = str(i)
...write data to a file called file...
teamname=open(file).readline() # want to use this in the new filename
teamfname=teamname.replace(" ","") #getting rid of spaces
file2 = "gotdata2_"+year+".txt"
os.system("tail -n +5 gotdata_"+year+".txt > "+file2)
The above code works as intended, creating file, then creating file2 that excludes the first 5 lines of file. However, when I change the name of file2 to be:
file2 = teamfname+"_"+year+".txt"
I get the error:
sh: line 1: _2010.txt: command not found
It's as if the end of my file2 statement is getting chopped off and the .txt part isn't being recognized. In this case, my code outputs a file but is missing the _2010.txt at the end. I've double checked that both year and teamfname are strings. I've also tried it with and without spaces in the teamfname string. I get the same error when I try to include a os.system mv statement that would rename the file to what I want it to be, so there must be something wrong with my understanding of how to specify the string here.
Does anyone have any ideas about what causes this? I haven't been able to find a solution, but I've found this problem difficult to search for.
Without knowing what your actual strings are, it's impossible to be sure what the problem is. However, it's almost certainly something to do with failing to properly quote and/or escape arguments for the command line.
My first guess would be that you have a newline in the middle of your filename, and the shell is truncating the command at the newline. But I wouldn't bet too heavily on that. If you actually printed out the repr of the pathname, I could tell you for sure. But why go through all this headache?
The solution to almost any problem with os.system is to not use os.system.
If you look at the docs, they even tell you this:
The subprocess module provides more powerful facilities for spawning new processes and retrieving their results; using that module is preferable to using this function. See the Replacing Older Functions with the subprocess Module section in the subprocess documentation for some helpful recipes.
If you use subprocess instead of os.system, you can avoid the shell entirely. You can also pass arguments as a list instead of trying to figure out how to quote them and escape them properly. Which would completely avoid the exact problem you're having.
For example, if you do this:
file2 = "gotdata2_"+year+".txt"
with open(file2, 'wb') as f:
subprocess.check_call(['tail', '-n', '+5', "gotdata_"+year+".txt"], stdout=f)
Then, if you change that first line to this:
file2 = teamfname+"_"+year+".txt"
It will still work even if teamfname has a space or a quote or another special character in it.
That being said, I'm not sure why you want to use tail in the first place. You can skip the first 5 lines just as easily directly in Python.
I have a simple bash command here for a script that I am re-writing in Python, and I've done a lot of searching and haven't found a simple answer. I am trying to echo the output of Print to a file, making sure there are no line breaks and that I can pass a variable into it. Here is just a little snippet (there are a lot of lines like this):
echo " ServerName www.${hostName}" >> $prjFile
Now I know it would end up looking something like:
print ("ServerName www.", hostName) >> prjFile
Right? But that doesn't work. Mind you, this is in Python 2.6 (as the machine this script will run on is using that version and there are other dependencies reliant on sticking with that version).
The syntax is;
print >>myfile, "ServerName www.", hostName,
where myfile is a file object opened in mode "a" (for "append").
The trailing comma prevents line breaks.
You might also want to use sys.stdout.softspace = False to prevent the spaces that Python adds between comma-separate arguments to print, and/or to print things as a single string:
print >>myfile, "ServerName www.%s" % hostName,
You can try a simple:
myFile = open('/tmp/result.file', 'w') # or 'a' to add text instead of truncate
myFile.write('whatever')
myFile.close()
In your case:
myFile = open(prjFile, 'a') # 'a' because you want to add to the existing file
myFile.write('ServerName www.{hostname}'.format(hostname=hostname))
myFile.close()