Develop Reference

Maximum characters that can be stuffed into raw_input() in Python

For an InterviewStreet challenge, we have to be able to accomodate for a 10,000 character String input from the keyboard, but when I copy/paste a 10k long word into my local testing, it cuts off at a thousand or so.
What's the official limit in Python? And is there a way to change this?
Thanks guys
Here's the challenge by-the-by:
http://www.interviewstreet.com/recruit/challenges/solve/view/4e1491425cf10/4edb8abd7cacd

Are you sure of the fact that your 10k long word doesn't contain newlines?
raw_input([prompt])
If the prompt argument is present, it is written to standard output without a trailing newline. The function then reads a line from input, converts it to a string (stripping a trailing newline), and returns that. When EOF is read, EOFError is raised.
...
If the readline module was loaded, then raw_input() will use it to provide elaborate line editing and history features.
There is no maximum limit (in python) of the buffer returned by raw_input, and as I tested some big length of input to stdin I could not reproduce your result. I tried to search the web for information regarding this but came up with nothing that would help me answer your question.
my tests
:/tmp% python -c 'print "A"*1000000' | python -c 'print len (raw_input ())';
1000000
:/tmp% python -c 'print "A"*210012300' | python -c 'print len (raw_input ())';
210012300
:/tmp% python -c 'print "A"*100+"\n"+"B"*100' | python -c 'print len (raw_input ())';
100

I had this same experience, and found python limits the length of input to raw_input if you do not import the readline module. Once I imported the readline module, it lifted the limit (or at least raised it significantly enough to where the text I was using worked just fine). This was on my Mac with Python 2.7.15. Additionally, it’s been confirmed working on at least 3.9.5.

I guess this is part of the challenges. The faq suggest raw_input() might not be the optimal approach:
The most common (possibly naive) methods are listed below. (...)
There are indeed Python standard modules helping to handle system input/output.

Reading a line from standard input in Python

What (if any) are the differences between the following two methods of reading a line from standard input: raw_input() and sys.stdin.readline() ? And in which cases one of these methods is preferable over the other ?

raw_input() takes an optional prompt argument. It also strips the trailing newline character from the string it returns, and supports history features if the readline module is loaded.
readline() takes an optional size argument, does not strip the trailing newline character and does not support history whatsoever.
Since they don't do the same thing, they're not really interchangeable. I personally prefer using raw_input() to fetch user input, and readline() to read lines out of a file.

"However, from the point of view of many Python beginners and educators, the use of sys.stdin.readline() presents the following problems:
Compared to the name "raw_input", the name "sys.stdin.readline()" is clunky and inelegant.
The names "sys" and "stdin" have no meaning for most beginners, who are mainly interested in what the function does, and not where in the package structure it is located. The lack of meaning also makes it difficult to remember: is it "sys.stdin.readline()", or " stdin.sys.readline()"? To a programming novice, there is not any obvious reason to prefer one over the other. In contrast, functions simple and direct names like print, input, and raw_input, and open are easier to remember." from here: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3111/

In Python what's the best way to emulate Perl's __END__?

Am I correct in thinking that that Python doesn't have a direct equivalent for Perl's __END__?
print "Perl...\n";
__END__
End of code. I can put anything I want here.
One thought that occurred to me was to use a triple-quoted string. Is there a better way to achieve this in Python?
print "Python..."
"""
End of code. I can put anything I want here.
"""

The __END__ block in perl dates from a time when programmers had to work with data from the outside world and liked to keep examples of it in the program itself.
Hard to imagine I know.
It was useful for example if you had a moving target like a hardware log file with mutating messages due to firmware updates where you wanted to compare old and new versions of the line or keep notes not strictly related to the programs operations ("Code seems slow on day x of month every month") or as mentioned above a reference set of data to run the program against. Telcos are an example of an industry where this was a frequent requirement.
Lastly Python's cult like restrictiveness seems to have a real and tiresome effect on the mindset of its advocates, if your only response to a question is "Why would you want to that when you could do X?" when X is not as useful please keep quiet++.

The triple-quote form you suggested will still create a python string, whereas Perl's parser simply ignores anything after __END__. You can't write:
"""
I can put anything in here...
Anything!
"""
import os
os.system("rm -rf /")
Comments are more suitable in my opinion.
#__END__
#Whatever I write here will be ignored
#Woohoo !

What you're asking for does not exist.
Proof: http://www.mail-archive.com/python-list#python.org/msg156396.html
A simple solution is to escape any " as \" and do a normal multi line string -- see official docs: http://docs.python.org/tutorial/introduction.html#strings
( Also, atexit doesn't work: http://www.mail-archive.com/python-list#python.org/msg156364.html )

Hm, what about sys.exit(0) ? (assuming you do import sys above it, of course)
As to why it would useful, sometimes I sit down to do a substantial rewrite of something and want to mark my "good up to this point" place.
By using sys.exit(0) in a temporary manner, I know nothing below that point will get executed, therefore if there's a problem (e.g., server error) I know it had to be above that point.
I like it slightly better than commenting out the rest of the file, just because there are more chances to make a mistake and uncomment something (stray key press at beginning of line), and also because it seems better to insert 1 line (which will later be removed), than to modify X-many lines which will then have to be un-modified later.
But yeah, this is splitting hairs; commenting works great too... assuming your editor supports easily commenting out a region, of course; if not, sys.exit(0) all the way!

I use __END__ all the time for multiples of the reasons given. I've been doing it for so long now that I put it (usually preceded by an exit('0');), along with BEGIN {} / END{} routines, in by force-of-habit. It is a shame that Python doesn't have an equivalent, but I just comment-out the lines at the bottom: extraneous, but that's about what you get with one way to rule them all languages.

Python does not have a direct equivalent to this.
Why do you want it? It doesn't sound like a really great thing to have when there are more consistent ways like putting the text at the end as comments (that's how we include arbitrary text in Python source files. Triple quoted strings are for making multi-line strings, not for non-code-related text.)
Your editor should be able to make using many lines of comments easy for you.

using an alternative string quotation syntax in python

Just wondering...
I find using escape characters too distracting. I'd rather do something like this (console code):
>>> print ^'Let's begin and end with sets of unlikely 2 chars and bingo!'^
Let's begin and end with sets of unlikely 2 chars and bingo!
Note the ' inside the string, and how this syntax would have no issue with it, or whatever else inside for basically all cases. Too bad markdown can't properly colorize it (yet), so I decided to <pre> it.
Sure, the ^ could be any other char, I'm not sure what would look/work better. That sounds good enough to me, tho.
Probably some other language already have a similar solution. And, just maybe, Python already have such a feature and I overlooked it. I hope this is the case.
But if it isn't, would it be too hard to, somehow, change Python's interpreter and be able to select an arbitrary (or even standardized) syntax for notating the strings?
I realize there are many ways to change statements and the whole syntax in general by using pre-compilators, but this is far more specific. And going any of those routes is what I call "too hard". I'm not really needing to do this so, again, I'm just wondering.

Python has this use """ or ''' as the delimiters
print '''Let's begin and end with sets of unlikely 2 chars and bingo'''
How often do you have both of 3' and 3" in a string

Awk, bash or python for converting a regular file?

I have a text file with lots of lines and with this structure:
[('name_1a',
'name_1b',
value_1),
('name_2a',
'name_2b',
value_2),
.....
.....
('name_XXXa',
'name_XXXb',
value_XXX)]
I would like to convert it to:
name_1a, name_1b, value_1
name_2a, name_2b, value_2
......
name_XXXa, name_XXXb, value_XXX
I wonder what would be the best way, whether awk, python or bash.
Thanks
Jose

Tried evaluating it python? Looks like a list of tuples to me.
eval(your_string)
Note, it's massively unsafe! If there's code in there to delete your hard disk, evaluating it will run that code!

I would like to use Python:
lines = open('filename.txt','r').readlines()
n = len(lines) # n % 3 == 0
for i in range(0,n,3):
name1 = lines[i].strip("',[]\n\r")
name2 = lines[i+1].strip("',[]\n\r")
value = lines[i+2].strip("',[]\n\r")
print name1,name2,value

It looks like legal Python. You might be able to just import it as a module and then write it back out after formatting it.

Oh boy, here is a job for ast.literal_eval:
(literal_eval is safer than eval, since it restricts the input string to literals such as strings, numbers, tuples, lists, dicts, booleans and None:
import ast
filename='in'
with open(filename,'r') as f:
contents=f.read()
data=ast.literal_eval(contents)
for elt in data:
print(', '.join(map(str,elt)))

here's one way to do it with (g)awk
$ awk -vRS=")," ' { gsub(/\n|[\047\]\[)(]/,"") } 1' file
name_1a,name_1b,value_1
name_2a,name_2b,value_2
name_XXXa,name_XXXb,value_XXX

Awk is typically line oriented, and bash is a shell, with limited numbrer of string manipulation functions. It really depends on where your strength as a programmer lies, but all other things being equal, I would choose python.
Did you ever consider that by redirecting the time it took to post this on SO, you could have had it done?
"AWK is a language for processing
files of text. A file is treated as a
sequence of records, and by default
each line is a record. Each line is
broken up into a sequence of fields,
so we can think of the first word in a
line as the first field, the second
word as the second field, and so on.
An AWK program is of a sequence of
pattern-action statements. AWK reads
the input a line at a time. A line is
scanned for each pattern in the
program, and for each pattern that
matches, the associated action is
executed." - Alfred V. Aho[2]

Asking what's the best language for doing a given task is a very different question to say, asking: 'what's the best way of doing a given task in a particular language'. The first, what you're asking, is in most cases entirely subjective.
Since this is a fairly simple task, I would suggest going with what you know (unless you're doing this for learning purposes, which I doubt).
If you know any of the languages you suggested, go ahead and solve this in a matter of minutes. If you know none of them, now enters the subjective part, I would suggest learning Python, since it's so much more fun than the other 2 ;)

If the values are legal python values, you can take advantage of eval() since your data is a legal python data sucture. The following would work if values are integers, otherwise you might have to massage the print call a bit:
input = """[('name_1a',
'name_1b',
1),
('name_2a',
'name_2b',
2),
('name_XXXa',
'name_XXXb',
3)]"""
for e in eval(input):
print '%s,%s,%d' % e
P.S. using eval() is quite controversial since it will execute any valid python code that you pass into it, so take care.