Learn Python the Hard Way, Exercise 15 - python

I'm trying to solve exercise 15's extra credit questions of Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way but I've ran into a problem. The code is as follows:
from sys import argv
script, filename = argv
txt = open(filename)
print "Here's your file %r:" % filename
print txt.read()
print "I'll also ask you to type it again:"
file_again = raw_input("> ")
txt_again = open(file_again)
print txt_again.read()
print txt_again.read()
I understand all the code that has been used, but extra credit question 7 asks:
Startup python again and use open from the prompt. Notice how you can open files and run read on them right there?
I've tried inputting everything I could think of in terminal (on a mac) after first starting up python with the 'python' command, but I can't get the code to run. What should I be doing to get this piece of code to run from the prompt?

Zed doesn't say to run this particular piece of code from within Python. Obviously, that code is getting the filename value from the parameters you used to invoke the script, and if you're just starting up the Python shell, you haven't used any parameters.
If you did:
filename = 'myfilename.txt'
txt = open(filename)
then it would work.

I just started with open(xyz.txt)
Well, yes, of course that isn't going to work, because you don't have a variable xyz, and even if you did, it wouldn't have an attribute txt. Since it's a file name, you want a string "xyz.txt", which you create by putting it in quotes: 'xyz.txt'. Notice that Python treats single and double quotes more or less the same; unlike in languages like C++ and Java, there is not a separate data type for individual characters - they're just length-1 strings.

Basically, just like in this transcript (I've added blank lines to aid readability):
pax:~$ python
Python 2.7.1+ (r271:86832, Apr 11 2011, 18:05:24)
[GCC 4.5.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> xyz = open ("minimal_main.c")
>>> print xyz.read()
int main (void) {
return 0;
}
>>> xyz.close()
>>> <CTRL-D>
pax:~$ _
All it's showing you is that you don't need a script in order to run Python commands, the command line interface can be used in much the same way.

print open('ex15_sample.txt').read()
After running python in terminal, we'll use open('filename.txt') to open the file and using the dot operator we can apply the read() function directly on it.

After running Python in terminal,
abc = open ("ex15_sample.txt")
print abc.read()
That should do.

Related

How to display on the screen a different character from the pressed one with Python?

I'm trying to write a program that works like the website https://www.peteranswers.com/. That is, to display a character on the screen that is part of a previously written text, whichever is the character you type. My attempt is this:
f=open("text1.txt", "r")
g=open("text2.txt", "w")
while True:
a = input()
g.write(a)
c = f.read(1)
if not c or a == "$":
break
print (c)
f.close()
g.close()
It works, but I would like not to display the characters you type and not to have to press enter each time.
How could this be done? Does it exist a more straightforward way to accomplish this task?
I'm working on Python 3.7 and IDLE.
The site you link does not work for me. From the code, I presume that you want something that works like a password entry function. But you want the characters echoed to be taken from an existing text instead of being nothing or a stream of ' 's or '*'s.
If so, I recommend that you modify the appropriate function, for Unix or Windows, in the getpass module. Note that both echo suppressing functions require that sys.stdout == sys.stdout (== system terminal and not None). Neither echo anything, you would have to add that. Neither work when you run in an IDE, such as IDLE, that rebind sys.stdout to print to a GUI.
If you are on Windows, you should read https://docs.python.org/3/library/msvcrt.html#console-i-o. You would use putch to write bytes, or use both getwch and putwch to input and output unicode characters. On Unix, you will have to dig into the code yourself.

passing directory with spaces in it from raw_input to os.listdir(path) in Python

I've looked at a few posts regarding this topic but haven't seen anything specifically fitting my usage. This one looks to be close to the same issue. They talk about escaping the escape characters.
My issue is that I want this script to run on both MAC and PC systems - and to be able to process files in a sub-folder that has spaces in the folder name.
Right now I use this code gleaned partially from several different SO posts:
directory = raw_input("Enter the location of the files: ")
path = r"%s" % directory
for file in os.listdir(path):
I don't quite understand what the second line is doing - so perhaps that's the obvious line that needs tweaking. It works fine with regular folder names but not with spaces in the name.
I have tried using "\ " instead of just " ", - that didn't work - but in any case I'm looking for a code solution. I don't want the user to have to specify an escape character
On Windoze using sub folder name "LAS Data" in response to raw_input prompt (without quotation marks), I get an message that:
the system can't find the path specified "LAS Data\*.*"
Your problem is most likely not with the code you present, but with the input you gave. The message
the system can't find the path specified "LAS Data\*.*"
suggest that you (or the user) entered the directory together with a wildcard for files. A directory with the name "LAS Data\*.*" indeed does not exist (unless you did something special to your file system :-).
Try entering just "LAS Data" instead.
The raw string should not be needed either
> python
Python 2.7.11 (v2.7.11:6d1b6a68f775, Dec 5 2015, 20:32:19) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> directory = raw_input("Enter the location of the files: ")
Enter the location of the files: Directory with Spaces
>>> for file in os.listdir(directory):
... print(file)
...
hello-1.txt
hello-2.txt
>>>
I don't quite understand what the [path = r"%s" % directory] line is doing
It creates a copy path of directory:
>>> directory = raw_input()
LAS Data
>>> path = r"%s" % directory
>>> path == directory
True
>>> type(path), type(directory)
(<type 'str'>, <type 'str'>)
Really wondering where you got that from. Seems pretty pointless.

Unable to load .pkl file [duplicate]

When I am trying to load something I dumped using cPickle, I get the error message:
ValueError: insecure string pickle
Both the dumping and loading work are done on the same computer, thus same OS: Ubuntu 8.04.
How could I solve this problem?
"are much more likely than a never-observed bug in Python itself in a functionality that's used billions of times a day all over the world": it always amazes me how cross people get in these forums.
One easy way to get this problem is by forgetting to close the stream that you're using for dumping the data structure. I just did
>>> out = open('xxx.dmp', 'w')
>>> cPickle.dump(d, out)
>>> k = cPickle.load(open('xxx.dmp', 'r'))
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: insecure string pickle
Which is why I came here in the first place, because I couldn't see what I'd done wrong.
And then I actually thought about it, rather than just coming here, and realized that I should have done:
>>> out = open('xxx.dmp', 'w')
>>> cPickle.dump(d, out)
>>> out.close() # close it to make sure it's all been written
>>> k = cPickle.load(open('xxx.dmp', 'r'))
Easy to forget. Didn't need people being told that they are idiots.
I've get this error in Python 2.7 because of open mode 'rb':
with open(path_to_file, 'rb') as pickle_file:
obj = pickle.load(pickle_file)
So, for Python 2 'mode' should be 'r'
Also, I've wondered that Python 3 doesn't support pickle format of Python 2, and in case when you'll try to load pickle file created in Python 2 you'll get:
pickle.unpicklingerror: the string opcode argument must be quoted
Check this thread. Peter Otten says:
A corrupted pickle. The error is
raised if a string in the dump does
not both start and end with " or '.
and shows a simple way to reproduce such "corruption". Steve Holden, in the follow-up post, suggests another way to cause the problem would be to mismatch 'rb' and 'wb' (but in Python 2 and on Linux that particular mistake should pass unnoticed).
What are you doing with data between dump() and load()? It's quite common error to store pickled data in file opened in text mode (on Windows) or in database storage in the way that doesn't work properly for binary data (VARCHAR, TEXT columns in some databases, some key-value storages). Try to compare pickled data that you pass to storage and immediately retrieved from it.
If anyone has this error using youtube-dl, this issue has the fix: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/7172#issuecomment-242961695
richiecannizzo commented on Aug 28
brew install libav
Should fix it instantly on mac or
sudo apt-get install libav
#on linux
This error may also occur with python 2 (and early versions of python 3) if your pickle is large (Python Issue #11564):
Python 2.7.11 |Anaconda custom (64-bit)| (default, Dec 6 2015, 18:08:32)
[GCC 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-1)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
Anaconda is brought to you by Continuum Analytics.
Please check out: http://continuum.io/thanks and https://anaconda.org
>>> import cPickle as pickle
>>> string = "X"*(2**31)
>>> pp = pickle.dumps(string)
>>> len(pp)
2147483656
>>> ss = pickle.loads(pp)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: insecure string pickle
This limitation was addressed with the introduction of pickle protocol 4 in python 3.4 (PEP 3154). Unfortunately, this feature has not been back-ported to python 2, and probably won't ever be. If this is your problem and you need to use python 2 pickle, the best you can do is reduce the size of your pickle, e.g., instead of pickling a list, pickle the elements individually into a list of pickles.
Same problem with a file that was made with python on windows, and reloaded with python on linux.
Solution : dos2unix on the file before reading in linux : works as a charm !
I got the Python ValueError: insecure string pickle message in a different way.
For me it happened after a base64 encoding a binary file and passing through urllib2 sockets.
Initially I was wrapping up a file like this
with open(path_to_binary_file) as data_file:
contents = data_file.read()
filename = os.path.split(path)[1]
url = 'http://0.0.0.0:8080/upload'
message = {"filename" : filename, "contents": contents}
pickled_message = cPickle.dumps(message)
base64_message = base64.b64encode(pickled_message)
the_hash = hashlib.md5(base64_message).hexdigest()
server_response = urllib2.urlopen(url, base64_message)
But on the server the hash kept coming out differently for some binary files
decoded_message = base64.b64decode(incoming_base64_message)
the_hash = hashlib.md5(decoded_message).hexdigest()
And unpickling gave insecure string pickle message
cPickle.loads(decoded_message)
BUT SUCCESS
What worked for me was to use urlsafe_b64encode()
base64_message = base64.urlsafe_b64encode(cPickle.dumps(message))
And decode with
base64_decoded_message = base64.urlsafe_b64decode(base64_message)
References
http://docs.python.org/2/library/base64.html
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3548.html#section-3
This is what happened to me, might be a small section of population, but I want to put this out here nevertheless, for them:
Interpreter (Python3) would have given you an error saying it required the input file stream to be in bytes, and not as a string, and you may have changed the open mode argument from 'r' to 'rb', and now it is telling you the string is corrupt, and thats why you have come here.
The simplest option for such cases is to install Python2 (You can install 2.7) and then run your program with Python 2.7 environment, so it unpickles your file without issue. Basically I wasted a lot of time scanning my string seeing if it was indeed corrupt when all I had to do was change the mode of opening the file from rb to r, and then use Python2 to unpickle the file. So I'm just putting this information out there.
I ran into this earlier, found this thread, and assumed that I was immune to the file closing issue mentioned in a couple of these answers since I was using a with statement:
with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(mode='wb') as temp_file:
pickle.dump(foo, temp_file)
# Push file to another machine
_send_file(temp_file.name)
However, since I was pushing the temp file from inside the with, the file still wasn't closed, so the file I was pushing was truncated. This resulted in the same insecure string pickle error in the script that read the file on the remote machine.
Two potential fixes to this: Keep the file open and force a flush:
with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(mode='wb') as temp_file:
pickle.dump(foo, temp_file)
temp_file.flush()
# Push file to another machine
_send_file(temp_file.name)
Or make sure the file is closed before doing anything with it:
file_name = ''
with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(mode='wb', delete=False) as temp_file:
file_name = temp_file.name
pickle.dump(foo, temp_file)
# Push file to another machine
_send_file(file_name)

ValueError: insecure string pickle

When I am trying to load something I dumped using cPickle, I get the error message:
ValueError: insecure string pickle
Both the dumping and loading work are done on the same computer, thus same OS: Ubuntu 8.04.
How could I solve this problem?
"are much more likely than a never-observed bug in Python itself in a functionality that's used billions of times a day all over the world": it always amazes me how cross people get in these forums.
One easy way to get this problem is by forgetting to close the stream that you're using for dumping the data structure. I just did
>>> out = open('xxx.dmp', 'w')
>>> cPickle.dump(d, out)
>>> k = cPickle.load(open('xxx.dmp', 'r'))
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: insecure string pickle
Which is why I came here in the first place, because I couldn't see what I'd done wrong.
And then I actually thought about it, rather than just coming here, and realized that I should have done:
>>> out = open('xxx.dmp', 'w')
>>> cPickle.dump(d, out)
>>> out.close() # close it to make sure it's all been written
>>> k = cPickle.load(open('xxx.dmp', 'r'))
Easy to forget. Didn't need people being told that they are idiots.
I've get this error in Python 2.7 because of open mode 'rb':
with open(path_to_file, 'rb') as pickle_file:
obj = pickle.load(pickle_file)
So, for Python 2 'mode' should be 'r'
Also, I've wondered that Python 3 doesn't support pickle format of Python 2, and in case when you'll try to load pickle file created in Python 2 you'll get:
pickle.unpicklingerror: the string opcode argument must be quoted
Check this thread. Peter Otten says:
A corrupted pickle. The error is
raised if a string in the dump does
not both start and end with " or '.
and shows a simple way to reproduce such "corruption". Steve Holden, in the follow-up post, suggests another way to cause the problem would be to mismatch 'rb' and 'wb' (but in Python 2 and on Linux that particular mistake should pass unnoticed).
What are you doing with data between dump() and load()? It's quite common error to store pickled data in file opened in text mode (on Windows) or in database storage in the way that doesn't work properly for binary data (VARCHAR, TEXT columns in some databases, some key-value storages). Try to compare pickled data that you pass to storage and immediately retrieved from it.
If anyone has this error using youtube-dl, this issue has the fix: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/7172#issuecomment-242961695
richiecannizzo commented on Aug 28
brew install libav
Should fix it instantly on mac or
sudo apt-get install libav
#on linux
This error may also occur with python 2 (and early versions of python 3) if your pickle is large (Python Issue #11564):
Python 2.7.11 |Anaconda custom (64-bit)| (default, Dec 6 2015, 18:08:32)
[GCC 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-1)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
Anaconda is brought to you by Continuum Analytics.
Please check out: http://continuum.io/thanks and https://anaconda.org
>>> import cPickle as pickle
>>> string = "X"*(2**31)
>>> pp = pickle.dumps(string)
>>> len(pp)
2147483656
>>> ss = pickle.loads(pp)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: insecure string pickle
This limitation was addressed with the introduction of pickle protocol 4 in python 3.4 (PEP 3154). Unfortunately, this feature has not been back-ported to python 2, and probably won't ever be. If this is your problem and you need to use python 2 pickle, the best you can do is reduce the size of your pickle, e.g., instead of pickling a list, pickle the elements individually into a list of pickles.
Same problem with a file that was made with python on windows, and reloaded with python on linux.
Solution : dos2unix on the file before reading in linux : works as a charm !
I got the Python ValueError: insecure string pickle message in a different way.
For me it happened after a base64 encoding a binary file and passing through urllib2 sockets.
Initially I was wrapping up a file like this
with open(path_to_binary_file) as data_file:
contents = data_file.read()
filename = os.path.split(path)[1]
url = 'http://0.0.0.0:8080/upload'
message = {"filename" : filename, "contents": contents}
pickled_message = cPickle.dumps(message)
base64_message = base64.b64encode(pickled_message)
the_hash = hashlib.md5(base64_message).hexdigest()
server_response = urllib2.urlopen(url, base64_message)
But on the server the hash kept coming out differently for some binary files
decoded_message = base64.b64decode(incoming_base64_message)
the_hash = hashlib.md5(decoded_message).hexdigest()
And unpickling gave insecure string pickle message
cPickle.loads(decoded_message)
BUT SUCCESS
What worked for me was to use urlsafe_b64encode()
base64_message = base64.urlsafe_b64encode(cPickle.dumps(message))
And decode with
base64_decoded_message = base64.urlsafe_b64decode(base64_message)
References
http://docs.python.org/2/library/base64.html
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3548.html#section-3
This is what happened to me, might be a small section of population, but I want to put this out here nevertheless, for them:
Interpreter (Python3) would have given you an error saying it required the input file stream to be in bytes, and not as a string, and you may have changed the open mode argument from 'r' to 'rb', and now it is telling you the string is corrupt, and thats why you have come here.
The simplest option for such cases is to install Python2 (You can install 2.7) and then run your program with Python 2.7 environment, so it unpickles your file without issue. Basically I wasted a lot of time scanning my string seeing if it was indeed corrupt when all I had to do was change the mode of opening the file from rb to r, and then use Python2 to unpickle the file. So I'm just putting this information out there.
I ran into this earlier, found this thread, and assumed that I was immune to the file closing issue mentioned in a couple of these answers since I was using a with statement:
with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(mode='wb') as temp_file:
pickle.dump(foo, temp_file)
# Push file to another machine
_send_file(temp_file.name)
However, since I was pushing the temp file from inside the with, the file still wasn't closed, so the file I was pushing was truncated. This resulted in the same insecure string pickle error in the script that read the file on the remote machine.
Two potential fixes to this: Keep the file open and force a flush:
with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(mode='wb') as temp_file:
pickle.dump(foo, temp_file)
temp_file.flush()
# Push file to another machine
_send_file(temp_file.name)
Or make sure the file is closed before doing anything with it:
file_name = ''
with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(mode='wb', delete=False) as temp_file:
file_name = temp_file.name
pickle.dump(foo, temp_file)
# Push file to another machine
_send_file(file_name)

Passing a multi-line string as an argument to a script in Windows

I have a simple python script like so:
import sys
lines = sys.argv[1]
for line in lines.splitlines():
print line
I want to call it from the command line (or a .bat file) but the first argument may (and probably will) be a string with multiple lines in it. How does one do this?
Of course, this works:
import sys
lines = """This is a string
It has multiple lines
there are three total"""
for line in lines.splitlines():
print line
But I need to be able to process an argument line-by-line.
EDIT: This is probably more of a Windows command-line problem than a Python problem.
EDIT 2: Thanks for all of the good suggestions. It doesn't look like it's possible. I can't use another shell because I'm actually trying to invoke the script from another program which seems to use the Windows command-line behind the scenes.
I know this thread is pretty old, but I came across it while trying to solve a similar problem, and others might as well, so let me show you how I solved it.
This works at least on Windows XP Pro, with Zack's code in a file called
"C:\Scratch\test.py":
C:\Scratch>test.py "This is a string"^
More?
More? "It has multiple lines"^
More?
More? "There are three total"
This is a string
It has multiple lines
There are three total
C:\Scratch>
This is a little more readable than Romulo's solution above.
Just enclose the argument in quotes:
$ python args.py "This is a string
> It has multiple lines
> there are three total"
This is a string
It has multiple lines
there are three total
The following might work:
C:\> python something.py "This is a string^
More?
More? It has multiple lines^
More?
More? There are three total"
This is the only thing which worked for me:
C:\> python a.py This" "is" "a" "string^
More?
More? It" "has" "multiple" "lines^
More?
More? There" "are" "three" "total
For me Johannes' solution invokes the python interpreter at the end of the first line, so I don't have the chance to pass additional lines.
But you said you are calling the python script from another process, not from the command line. Then why don't you use dbr' solution? This worked for me as a Ruby script:
puts `python a.py "This is a string\nIt has multiple lines\nThere are three total"`
And in what language are you writing the program which calls the python script? The issue you have is with argument passing, not with the windows shell, not with Python...
Finally, as mattkemp said, I also suggest you use the standard input to read your multi-line argument, avoiding command line magic.
Not sure about the Windows command-line, but would the following work?
> python myscript.py "This is a string\nIt has multiple lines\there are three total"
..or..
> python myscript.py "This is a string\
It has [...]\
there are [...]"
If not, I would suggest installing Cygwin and using a sane shell!
Have you tried setting you multiline text as a variable and then passing the expansion of that into your script. For example:
set Text="This is a string
It has multiple lines
there are three total"
python args.py %Text%
Alternatively, instead of reading an argument you could read from standard in.
import sys
for line in iter(sys.stdin.readline, ''):
print line
On Linux you would pipe the multiline text to the standard input of args.py.
$ <command-that-produces-text> | python args.py

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