Let string act as file - python

I am working with a library that wants me to pass it data in the form of a file name. Then it will open that file and read the data. I have the data in a string, and I don't want to write it to a file (because I don't want to have to delete it afterwards).
Is there a way I can convert the string to a stream and generate a file name that will allow my library to open my stream and access the contents of my string?

import tempfile
fh = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() # this creates an actual file in the temp directory
fh.write(my_string)
print fh.name
call_other_thing(fh.name)
fh.close() # file is now deleted

Related

How to create and use a text file in Python?

I need to create a text file in Python to store certain data from a game. I do not want to use numpy, or any external libraries if at all possible.
I need to put some numerical data. Do text files require string data? Also does the data come out of the file as a string?
I know how to create and open a text file, and how to convert string to integer and vice versa, as well as handle CSV file data. I do not know how to handle a text file.
Any ideas on what to do?
To create a file:
file = open("textfile.txt","w+")
This will create a file if it doesn't exist in the directory.
To write inside it:
file.write("This is the content of the file.")
And then you'll have to close the instance with
file.close()
by using the with open command you can create and use it
here is an example
Here w is for writing mode
with open('test.txt','w') as d:
d.write('your text goes here')
You can write to file like this if the file not exists then it will be created
Any ideas on what to do?
Put your data into dict and use built-in json module, example:
import json
data = {'gold': 500, 'name': 'xyzzy'}
# writing
with open('save.json', 'w') as f:
json.dump(data, f)
# reading
with open('save.json', 'r') as f:
data2 = json.load(f)
This create human-readable text file.

How to create a PDF from a binary string?

There is a request has been made to the server using Python's requests module:
requests.get('myserver/pdf', headers)
It returned a status-200 response, which all contains PDF binary data in response.content
Question
How does one create a PDF file from the response.content?
You can create an empty pdf then save write to that pdf in binary like this:
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
import requests
# Example of path. This file has not been created yet but we
# will use this as the location and name of the pdf in question
path_to_create_pdf_with_name_of_pdf = r'C:/User/Oleg/MyDownloadablePdf.pdf'
# Anything you used before making the request. Since you did not
# provide code I did not know what you used
.....
request = requests.get('myserver/pdf', headers)
#Actually creates the empty pdf that we will use to write the binary data to
pdf_file = canvas.Canvas(path_to_create_pdf_with_name_of_pdf)
#Open the empty pdf that we created above and write the binary data to.
with open(path_to_create_pdf_with_name_of_pdf, 'wb') as f:
f.write(request.content)
f.close()
The reportlab.pdfgen allows you to make a new pdf by specifying the path you want to save the pdf in along with the name of the pdf using the canvas.Canvas method. As stated in my answer you need to provide the path to do this.
Once you have an empty pdf, you can open the pdf file as wb (write binary) and write the content of the pdf from the request to the file and close the file.
When using the path - ensure that the name is not the name of any existing files to ensure that you do not overwrite any existing files. As the comments show, if this name is the name of any other file then you risk overwriting the data. If you are doing this in a loop for example, you will need to specify the path with a new name at each iteration to ensure that you have a new pdf each time. But if it is a one-off thing then you do not run that risk so as long as it is not the name of another file.

Convert cStringIO variable into file

I have an Excel file created inside a cStringIO variable.
I need to open it and read it. But to open an excel file with the xlrd function xlrd.open_workbook(excel_file_name), I need to call it by its file name. But in this case there is no file name because it is a cStrinIO variable that contains the representation of the Excel file.
How can I convert the cStringIO variable into a real excel file that I can open?
Thank you!
Looks like xlrd.open_workbook() accepts file_contents argument as well, so maybe as follows?
xlrd.open_workbook(file_contents=cstringio_var.getvalue())
You can use tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile.
Example (not tested):
with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as f:
f.write(your_cStringIO_variable.read())
f.flush()
something = xlrd.open_workbook(f.name)

Create hash table from the contents of a file

How can I open a text file, read the contents of the file and create a hash table from this content? So far I have tried:
import json
json_data = open(/home/azoi/Downloads/yes/1.txt).read()
data = json.loads(json_data)
pprint(data)
I suggest this solution:
import json
with open("/home/azoi/Downloads/yes/1.txt") as f:
data=json.load(f)
pprint(data)
The with statement ensures that your file is automatically closed whatever happens and that your program throws the correct exception if the open fails. The json.load function directoly loads data from an open file handle.
Additionally, I strongly suggest reading and understanding the Python tutorial. It's essential reading and won't take too long.
To open a file you have to use the open statment correctly, something like:
json_data=open('/home/azoi/Downloads/yes/1.txt','r')
where the first string is the path to the file and the second is the mode: r = read, w = write, a = append

Python: Converting Entire Directory of JSON to Python Dictionaries to send to MongoDB

I'm relatively new to Python, and extremely new to MongoDB (as such, I'll only be concerned with taking the text files and converting them). I'm currently trying to take a bunch of .txt files that are in JSON to move them into MongoDB. So, my approach is to open each file in the directory, read each line, convert it from JSON to a dictionary, and then over-write that line that was JSON as a dictionary. Then it'll be in a format to send to MongoDB
(If there's any flaw in my reasoning, please point it out)
At the moment, I've written this:
"""
Kalil's step by step iteration / write.
JSON dumps takes a python object and serializes it to JSON.
Loads takes a JSON string and turns it into a python dictionary.
So we return json.loads so that we can take that JSON string from the tweet and save it as a dictionary for Pymongo
"""
import os
import json
import pymongo
rootdir='~/Tweets'
def convert(line):
line = file.readline()
d = json.loads(lines)
return d
for subdir, dirs, files in os.walk(rootdir):
for file in files:
f=open(file, 'r')
lines = f.readlines()
f.close()
f=open(file, 'w')
for line in lines:
newline = convert(line)
f.write(newline)
f.close()
But it isn't writing.
Which... As a rule of thumb, if you're not getting the effect that you're wanting, you're making a mistake somewhere.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
When you decode a json file you don't need to convert line by line as the parser will iterate over the file for you (that is unless you have one json document per line).
Once you've loaded the json document you'll have a dictionary which is a data structure and cannot be directly written back to file without first serializing it into a certain format such as json, yaml or many others (the format mongodb uses is called bson but your driver will handle the encoding for you).
The overall process to load a json file and dump it into mongo is actually pretty simple and looks something like this:
import json
from glob import glob
from pymongo import Connection
db = Connection().test
for filename in glob('~/Tweets/*.txt'):
with open(filename) as fp:
doc = json.load(fp)
db.tweets.save(doc)
a dictionary in python is an object that lives within the program, you can't save the dictionary directly to a file unless you pickle it (pickling is a way to save objects in files so you can retrieve it latter). Now I think a better approach would be to read the lines from the file, load the json which converts that json to a dictionary and save that info into mongodb right away, no need to save that info into a file.

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