weird python print behaviour - python

why this does not print anything:
for item in pipe.json["value"]["items"]:
print item["pubDate"]
but this does:
for item in pipe.json["value"]["items"]:
print item["pubDate"] + "\n"
p.s. the loop is running inside another loop.
p.p.s. this is running inside google app engine application.i have looked at http response and it is completely empty in the first case.

It might be a problem with buffering, in which case flushing stdout would help.
import sys
sys.stdout.flush()

Are you using some sort of wsgi framework, or just trying to write pure CGI code (which is a mistake?)
You probably don't want to be using print at all here, but rather using your framework's method of adding to the response (for webapp, self.response.out.write). My guess would be that without the extra \n, you're writing all of this data to the HTTP headers, and with it you're only losing the first line of your output.

On GAE if you want to use print for output you'll have to print an empty string before any printing so that these kind of problems won't happen:
print ""
print "something"

This is just a wild guess, but if item['pubDate'] is a non-string object it might a result of differences between special methods. Perhaps the __str__ method returns nothing, while the __add__ method does something different.

Related

Confusion about returning values when files finish getting executed

So I have 2 files, fish_life_simulator.py and menu.py. fish_life_simulator.py is the main file and executes other files like menu.py depending on what happens. So here is the code and how it should work:
import os
os.chdir(os.path.dirname(__file__))
result = exec(open(r'menu.py', encoding='utf-8').read())
print(result)
So at first when the code arrives to result = exec(open(r'menu.py', encoding='utf-8').read()) it executes menu.py and all is fine, but it could stop for several reasons:
The player exit the game
The player entered settings
The player pressed play
So what I decided to do, is when menu.py will stop running it will return a value, like 1, 2 or 3, so I tried several methods that have been included in here:
Best way to return a value from a python script
like using return or sys.exit("some value here"), but even though I did the part inside of menu.py, neither of them worked, as when I tried return, result from result = exec(open(r'menu.py', encoding='utf-8').read()) always was None for some reason and when I tried sys.exit(1) for example, result didn't get printed at all, so I was just wandering if it was something I was missing inside of fish_life_simulator.py, because the part with sending the value should be fine, but the part of receiving it is problematic.
Just define a function in menu.py:
def do_stuff_in_menu():
...
return result
and in fish_life_simulator.py you just call that function:
import menu
result = menu.do_stuff_in_menu()
print(result)
I agree with everyone who says exec() is not the best way to do this, however, since that's not your question, here's an answer for you.
The exec() function always returns None (see docs). If you need the return code, you could use os.system() or one of the various methods from the subprocess library. Unlike exec(), however, both of these alternatives would create a child process.
That said, I personally would not use any of those methods, but would instead modify menu.py to allow you to import it. It's much more natural and direct.

How do I add a separate function for average calculation?

I am stuck on this problem. Code I have so far works but my Professor wants to see some changes. I need to add error handing and I need a separate function for calculating average which I will call in main. Here is the what I have so far...
import os
def process_file(filename):
f = open(filename,'r')
lines = f.readlines()[1:]
f.close()
scores = []
for line in lines:
parsed = line.split(",")
count = int(parsed[1])
scores.append(count)
calculate_result(scores)
def calculate_result(scores):
print("High: ", max(scores))
print("Low: ", min(scores))
print("Average: ", sum(scores)/len(scores))
def main():
filename = "scores.text"
if os.path.isfile(filename):
process_file(filename)
else:
print ("File does not exist")
return 0
main()
I guess there are 2 parts:
I need to add error handling
and
I need a separate function for calculating average which I will call in main
The second part I don't think you need help with. But error handling is kind of an art, so I can see where you might be stuck on that. Here are some suggestions to help get started.
The most common type of error handling involves dealing with input. Thinking more broadly, we could expand that to anything that crosses the boundary of the programs memory space. This includes not just user input, but also output; filesystem interaction; using network interfaces (or any communication device or hardware interface); starting/stopping or otherwise interacting with other programs; calling a library that does any of these things on our behalf; and many more....
So what parts of your program are interacting with "the outside" ? I can see a few:
in main() the program is making an assumption about the existence of a file. You are already checking to make sure this file exists, and returning 0 if it doesn't (you might want to change that to a non-zero value, since 0 is usually used to signal that no error occurred)
process_file() does this: f = open(filename,'r') but are you sure that will work? Are there conditions where this could fail?
What if the user that is running the program doesn't have permissions to read that file?
What if the file was deleted or changed between the time it was checked in main and the subsequent open call in process_file? This is a TOCTOU race condition, and it is something that every software developer needs to watch out for.
Probably the most obvious source of potential errors for this program is the content of the input file:
We're assuming the input is comma-separated. What if the user uses tabs or some other character?
While processing the lines, you've got: count = int(parsed[1]), but how do you know that parsed[1] can be cast to an int?
What will happen if the file exists, but is empty (hint: len(scores)==0)? Always look at these edge cases.
Finally, it looks like you are using if-then statements for error checking. That is fine, but another powerful tool for dealing with errors are try-except statements. They are not mutually exclusive: sometimes it's easier to use an if statement, and sometimes catching an exception with try-except is better. Some of the errors you'll need to deal with are easier to handle using one approach over the other.

Segmentation fault when initializing array

I am getting a segmentation fault when initializing an array.
I have a callback function from when an RFID tag gets read
IDS = []
def readTag(e):
epc = str(e.epc, 'utf-8')
if not epc in IDS:
now = datetime.datetime.now().strftime('%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S')
IDS.append([epc, now, "name.instrument"])
and a main function from which it's called
def main():
for x in vals:
IDS.append([vals[0], vals[1], vals[2]])
for x in IDS:
print(x[0])
r = mercury.Reader("tmr:///dev/ttyUSB0", baudrate=9600)
r.set_region("NA")
r.start_reading(readTag, on_time=1500)
input("press any key to stop reading: ")
r.stop_reading()
The error occurs because of the line IDS.append([epc, now, "name.instrument"]). I know because when I replace it with a print call instead the program will run just fine. I've tried using different types for the array objects (integers), creating an array of the same objects outside of the append function, etc. For some reason just creating an array inside the "readTag" function causes the segmentation fault like row = [1,2,3]
Does anyone know what causes this error and how I can fix it? Also just to be a little more specific, the readTag function will work fine for the first two (only ever two) calls, but then it crashes and the Reader object that has the start_reading() function is from the mercury-api
This looks like a scoping issue to me; the mercury library doesn't have permission to access your list's memory address, so when it invokes your callback function readTag(e) a segfault occurs. I don't think that the behavior that you want is supported by that library
To extend Michael's answer, this appears to be an issue with scoping and the API you're using. In general pure-Python doesn't seg-fault. Or at least, it shouldn't seg-fault unless there's a bug in the interpreter, or some extension that you're using. That's not to say pure-Python won't break, it's just that a genuine seg-fault indicates the problem is probably the result of something messy outside of your code.
I'm assuming you're using this Python API.
In that case, the README.md mentions that the Reader.start_reader() method you're using is "asynchronous". Meaning it invokes a new thread or process and returns immediately and then the background thread continues to call your callback each time something is scanned.
I don't really know enough about the nitty gritty of CPython to say exactly what going on, but you've declared IDS = [] as a global variable and it seems like the background thread is running the callback with a different context to the main program. So when it attempts to access IDS it's reading memory it doesn't own, hence the seg-fault.
Because of how restrictive the callback is and the apparent lack of a buffer, this might be an oversight on the behalf of the developer. If you really need asynchronous reads it's worth sending them an issue report.
Otherwise, considering you're just waiting for input you probably don't need the asynchronous reads, and you could use the synchronous Reader.read() method inside your own busy loop instead with something like:
try:
while True:
readTags(r.read(timeout=10))
except KeyboardInterrupt: ## break loop on SIGINT (Ctrl-C)
pass
Note that r.read() returns a list of tags rather than just one, so you'd need to modify your callback slightly, and if you're writing more than just a quick script you probably want to use threads to interrupt the loop properly as SIGINT is pretty hacky.

Three ways to print in Python -- when to use each?

According to Tim Peters, "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." In Python, there appears to be three ways to print information:
print('Hello World', end='')
sys.stdout.write('Hello World')
os.write(1, b'Hello World')
Question: Are there best-practice policies that state when each of these three different methods of printing should be used in a program?
Note that the statement of Tim is perfectly correct: there is only one obvious way to do it: print().
The other two possibilities that you mention have different goals.
If we want to summarize the goals of the three alternatives:
print is the high-level function that allow you to write something to stdout(or an other file). It provides a simple and readable API, with some fancy options about how the single items are separated, or whether you want to add or not a terminator etc. This is what you want to do most of the time.
sys.stdout.write is just a method of the file objects. So the real point of sys.stdout is that you can pass it around as if it were any other file. This is useful when you have to deal with a function that is expecting a file and you want it to print the text directly on stdout.
In other words you shouldn't use sys.stdout.write at all. You just pass around sys.stdout to code that expects a file.
Note: in python2 there were some situations where using the print statement produced worse code than calling sys.stdout.write. However the print function allows you to define the separator and terminator and thus avoids almost all these corner cases.
os.write is a low-level call to write to a file. You must manually encode the contents and you also have to pass the file descriptor explicitly. This is meant to handle only low level code that, for some reason, cannot be implemented on top of the higher-level interfaces. You almost never want to call this directly, because it's not required and has a worse API than the rest.
Note that if you have code that should write down things on a file, it's better to do:
my_file.write(a)
# ...
my_file.write(b)
# ...
my_file.write(c)
Than:
print(a, file=my_file)
# ...
print(b, file=my_file)
# ...
print(c, file=my_file)
Because it's more DRY. Using print you have to repeat file= everytime. This is fine if you have to write only in one place of the code, but if you have 5/6 different writes is much easier to simply call the write method directly.
To me print is the right way to print to stdout, but :
There is a good reason why sys.stdout.write exists - Imagine a class which generates some text output, and you want to make it write to either stdout, and file on disk, or a string. Ideally the class really shouldn't care what output type it is writing to. The class can simple be given a file object, and so long as that object supports the write method, the class can use the write method to output the text.
Two of these methods require importing entire modules. Based on this alone, print() is the best standard use option.
sys.stdout is useful whenever stdout may change. This gives quite a bit of power for stream handling.
os.write is useful for os specific writing tasks (non blocking writes for instance)
This question has been asked a number of times on this site for sys.stdout vs. print:
Python - The difference between sys.stdout.write and print
print() vs sys.stdout.write(): which and why?
One example for using os.write (non blocking file writes demonstrated in the question below). The function may only be useful on some os's but it still must remain portable even when certain os's don't support different/special behaviors.
How to write to a file using non blocking IO?

Why does my generator hang instead of throwing exception?

I have a generator that returns lines from a number of files, through a filter. It looks like this:
def line_generator(self):
# Find the relevant files
files = self.get_files()
# Read lines
input_object = fileinput.input(files)
for line in input_object:
# Apply filter and yield if it is not *None*
filtered = self.__line_filter(input_object.filename(), line)
if filtered is not None:
yield filtered
input_object.close()
The method self.get_files() returns a list of file paths or an empty list.
I have tried to do s = fileinput.input([]), and then call s.next(). This is where it hangs, and I cannot understand why. I'm trying to be pythonic, and not handling all errors myself, but I guess this is one where there is no way around. Or is there?
Unfortunately I have no means of testing this on Linux right now, but could someone please try the following on Linux, and comment what they get?
import fileinput
s = fileinput.input([])
s.next()
I'm on Windows with Python 2.7.5 (64 bit).
All in all, I'd really like to know:
Is this a bug in Python, or me that is doing something wrong?
Shouldn't .next() always return something, or raise a StopIteration?
fileinput defaults to stdin if the list is empty, so it's just waiting for you to type something.
An obvious fix would be to get rid of fileinput (is not terribly useful anyway) and to be explicit, as python zen suggests:
for path in self.get_files():
with open(path) as fp:
for line in fp:
etc
As others already have answered, I try to answer one specific sub-item:
Shouldn't .next() always return something, or raise a StopIteration?
Yes, but it is not specified when this return is supposed to happen: within some milliseconds, seconds or even longer.
If you have a blocking iterator, you can define some wrapper around it so that it runs inside a different thread, filling a list or something, and the originating thread gets an interface to determine if there are data, if there are currently no data or if the source is exhausted.
I can elaborate on this even more if needed.

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