date:20060320

QOTW: Anything with 'Python' in its name can't market Python
well. - Iain Bicking

Who really cares whether NASA uses Python? One thing I learned from
having to sit through too many software marketing presentations is
that organizations like NASA are to software what the Library of
Congress is to books. - Steven Lumos on comp.lang.ruby

How would you compare two strings when you don't care about
whitespace? Hint: no regular expressions needed.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_frm/thread/2ad8fae9cc32e333/b4dc3a17d7502391

Jarek Zgoda's hack seems to be the most reliable way to get localized
month names.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_frm/thread/7d8e318b9b27a460/8b8283877bc02aa1?tvc=1

Python 2.5 is scheduled for August 19, 2006. Among the highlights are
the with-statement simplifying reliable resource acquisition/release
and Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree. When bugs due to clever workarounds
made it into the standard library Guido finally gave in, so there will
be an inline-if/else, too. Use with discretion :-)
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/f6f95174484c24cc

Experienced developers wrestle with thorny deployment issues.
http://blog.ianbicking.org/packaging-python.html

Is coding a text adventure? Matt Webb and his co-developers think so.
They use Python as the tried and tested tool to explore new ideas.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70413-0.html?tw=wn_technology_4

Iain Bicking shares his thoughts about the new python.org website and
marketing Python.
http://blog.ianbicking.org/python-marketing-2006.html

You don't always need a big fat office suite to get your data out of
an Excel spreadsheet.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_frm/thread/af8f5484123101ae/fd7fb0d4d894dce2?tvc=1

Stackless Python has been ported to Python 2.4.2.
http://www.stackless.com/Members/rmtew/pycon2006Result

Everything Python-related you want is probably one or two clicks away in
these pages:

Python.org's Python Language Website is the traditional
center of Pythonia
http://www.python.org
Notice especially the master FAQ
http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html

PythonWare complements the digest you're reading with the
marvelous daily python url
http://www.pythonware.com/daily
Mygale is a news-gathering webcrawler that specializes in (new)
World-Wide Web articles related to Python.
http://www.awaretek.com/nowak/mygale.html
While cosmetically similar, Mygale and the Daily Python-URL
are utterly different in their technologies and generally in
their results.

For far, FAR more Python reading than any one mind should
absorb, much of it quite interesting, several pages index
much of the universe of Pybloggers.
http://lowlife.jp/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/PythonProgrammersWeblog
http://www.planetpython.org/
http://mechanicalcat.net/pyblagg.html

comp.lang.python.announce announces new Python software. Be
sure to scan this newsgroup weekly.

http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djqas_ugroup=comp.lang.python.announce

Steve Bethard, Tim Lesher, and Tony Meyer continue the marvelous
tradition early borne by Andrew Kuchling, Michael Hudson and Brett
Cannon of intelligently summarizing action on the python-dev mailing
list once every other week.
http://www.python.org/dev/summary/

The Python Package Index catalogues packages.
http://www.python.org/pypi/

The somewhat older Vaults of Parnassus ambitiously collects references
to all sorts of Python resources.
http://www.vex.net/~x/parnassus/

Much of Python's real work takes place on Special-Interest Group
mailing lists
http://www.python.org/sigs/

Python Success Stories--from air-traffic control to on-line
match-making--can inspire you or decision-makers to whom you're
subject with a vision of what the language makes practical.
http://www.pythonology.com/success

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has replaced the Python
Consortium as an independent nexus of activity. It has official
responsibility for Python's development and maintenance.
http://www.python.org/psf/
Among the ways you can support PSF is with a donation.
http://www.python.org/psf/donate.html

Kurt B. Kaiser publishes a weekly report on faults and patches.
http://www.google.com/groups?as_usubject=weekly%20python%20patch

Although unmaintained since 2002, the Cetus collection of Python
hyperlinks retains a few gems.
http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_python.html

Python FAQTS
http://python.faqts.com/

The Cookbook is a

Re: Pycrypto - active ??

2006-03-20 Thread dirvine

Yes the homepage says updated, but I think that refers to more than
just pycrypto. The data etc. all seems old. Perhaps it's at it's level
?

I just wonder if the project itself is active and more recent docs
exist to answer some of the questions I have posed.

I certainly hope theres some answers.

-- 
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Re: Chained Comparisons

On 20/03/2006 5:24 PM, Sathyaish wrote:
 I) What does the following expression evaluate to?
 
 a  b == c
 
 1) (a  b) and (b == c)
 2) (a  b) or (b == c)
 

Given the common idiom in mathematics (a = b = c) and what it means, 
please contemplate which of and and or might be the more 
sensible/useful/plausible answer. Failing that, try to write a small 
script which answers your question. If that doesn't work, try reading 
section 5.9 (Comparisons) of the Python Reference Manual.

 
 II) How many operands can be chained for comparison in a single
 expression? For e.g, is the under-stated expression a valid comparison
 chain?
 
 a  b == c  d
 

Similar process: infer a plausible answer / script / see the above 
manual reference.
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Re: Chained Comparisons

John,


I did guess but I wasn't quite sure and so I asked. OK, I did not
perform a search on the docs, but that was because:

1) It is easier to learn through an interactive medium like a forum;
and
2) A search in the same document you are reading takes you off and
adrift, and as such, is equivalant to a task-switch, because you're
already reading some material from the same help file and are stuck at
some point.

Thanks for the help.

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Re: whats your favourite object relational mapper?

2006-03-20 Thread Giovanni Bajo

Jonathan Ellis wrote:

 ... which, of course, goes to show how stupid a metric this is, now
 that even Ian Bicking has admitted that SqlObject in its current form
 is a dead end.


Got a pointer?
-- 
Giovanni Bajo


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Re: C API: Testing my reference counting

2006-03-20 Thread Martin v. Löwis

lord trousers wrote:
 Is there a way I can get hold of these kinds of statistics for
 debugging?

This is best done when Python is build in debug mode.
sys.gettotalrefcount then gives you the number of INCREF
calls for which no DECREF has been made; you said that
this shouldn't change.

If it does change, sys.get_counts() will give you the
number of objects per type.

Furthermore, sys.getobjects() will give you a list of
all objects allocated (excluding the result list).

HTH,
Martin
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Re: Python 2.5 Schedule

2006-03-20 Thread Martin v. Löwis

Ben Finney wrote:
 - ASCII is the default coding
 
 Er? How did this happen?
 
 To be specific, what about all the movement toward UTF-8?

See PEP 263. ASCII is the default encoding for source code;
if you want to use UTF-8 in source code, either put

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

into the file, or start the file with the UTF-8 signature
(if your editor supports that).

Regards,
Martin
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combining mod_python handlers publisher and psp problem

2006-03-20 Thread exhuma.twn

Simple problem:

When I define a funtion the way you would with the publisher handler
(without using psp), all works as expected. However when I define a
publisher-like function and instantiate a PSP object in it ( as
suggested on
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2004/02/26/python_server_pages.html
) mod_python seems to fail to tell the browser which content-type the
document has. The output is what I expect it to be, but instead of
rendering the page I see the source code, so I suppose the browser sees
it as text/python or text/plain.

I tried to do a

   print Content-Type: text/html
   print

as first statement, but then it only outputs that as normal text too.

Any ideas?

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Re: Chained Comparisons

2006-03-20 Thread Duncan Booth

Sathyaish wrote:

 I did guess but I wasn't quite sure and so I asked. OK, I did not
 perform a search on the docs, but that was because:
 
 1) It is easier to learn through an interactive medium like a forum;

and what exactly do you think the other people in the forum do? They go off 
and read the documentation so that they can be sure to quote it back 
accurately to you. So you've saved yourself the bother of looking up the 
docs just so that a large number of people can all do it for you.

Please, in future, try looking in the documentation before you post: if 
you've looked and can't find what you need, that's fine, or if you've found 
it unclear and want more information that is also fine.

 2) A search in the same document you are reading takes you off and
 adrift, and as such, is equivalant to a task-switch, because you're
 already reading some material from the same help file and are stuck at
 some point.

I've tried reading this several times and can't make sense of what you are 
trying to say?
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Error sending message [1142579362378.1884.rpppl] from [randpoly.com]

2006-03-20 Thread randpoly.com PostMaster

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Fri, 17 Mar 2006 12:39:22 +0530
From: python-list@python.org
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Re: combining mod_python handlers publisher and psp problem

2006-03-20 Thread exhuma.twn

exhuma.twn wrote:
 Simple problem:

 When I define a funtion the way you would with the publisher handler
 (without using psp), all works as expected. However when I define a
 publisher-like function and instantiate a PSP object in it ( as
 suggested on
 http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2004/02/26/python_server_pages.html
 ) mod_python seems to fail to tell the browser which content-type the
 document has. The output is what I expect it to be, but instead of
 rendering the page I see the source code, so I suppose the browser sees
 it as text/python or text/plain.

 I tried to do a

print Content-Type: text/html
print

 as first statement, but then it only outputs that as normal text too.

 Any ideas?

Update:
I got it working. My old code was as follows:

   def index(req, name='John'):
  s = 'Hello, there!'
  if name:
 names = ['a', 'b', 'c']
 s = 'Hello, %s!' % name.capitalize()
 tmpl = psp.PSP(req, filename='index.psp')
 tmpl.run(vars = { 'greet': s, 'names': names })
  return

Now I did this:

   def index(req, name='John'):
  s = 'Hello, there!'
  if name:
 names = ['a', 'b', 'c']
 s = 'Hello, %s!' % name.capitalize()
 tmpl = psp.PSP(req, filename='index.psp',
vars = { 'greet': s, 'names': names })
  return tmpl

So basically I assigned the variables on instantiation of the PSP
object and returned the resulting reference. This is different to what
is noted at onlamp.com

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Re: IMAP Folder Size Information

2006-03-20 Thread Tim Williams (gmail)

On 20/03/06, Kevin F [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I'm trying to use the following code to get my remote server's foldersize information.Unfortunately, i'm getting the error:Traceback (most recent call last): File /Life/School/Homework/Spring 2006/OPIM
399/Tutorial/IMAP/mailboxsize.py, line 23, in -toplevel- number_of_messages_all += int(number_of_messages[0])ValueError: invalid literal for int(): The requested item could not befound.
The error is on line 23, so insert the following print statement at line 23

23  print number_of_messages =, number_of_messages # For debugging
24  number_of_messages_all += int(number_of_messages[0]) # original line

and the reported error changes to:

number_of_messages = ['Could not select box']
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File C:\MXEXTRA\scripts\imapt1.py, line 24, in ?
 number_of_messages_all += int(number_of_messages[0])
ValueError: invalid literal for int(): Could not select box

HTH :)


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Re: Programming challenge: wildcard exclusion in cartesian products

2006-03-20 Thread Dinko Tenev

Doug Quale wrote:
 funkyj [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

  One advantage of a generator over filtering the full product is that I,
  as the user of the generator, am not obligated to iterate over the
  entire solution space.
 
  Are there other _practical_ advantages of generators over mapping 
  filtering complete sets?

 Storage.  You can iterate over problem spaces much too large to fit in
 memory.  Also generate + iterate can be faster because of reduced
 memory pressure.

Hmmm...storage is not an issue in the Prolog version.  It generates a
candidate solution, then checks membership in the wildcard set, then
backtracks (backtracking is caused by fail in the test goal.)  On
backtracking, it effectively forgets the last solution, so the memory
is freed up (or at least free to be reclaimed through GC.)

Cheers,

Dinko

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Error sending message [1142825372138.2332.rpppl] from [randpoly.com]

2006-03-20 Thread randpoly.com PostMaster

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Re: Keeping a function from taking to long--threads?

2006-03-20 Thread Rene Pijlman

[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
I'm using windows, and from what I've tried, the setdefaulttimeout 
function doesn't work on my machine.

It should. It does on mine.

-- 
René Pijlman

Wat wil jij leren?  http://www.leren.nl
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mod_python + publisher + psp + session problems

2006-03-20 Thread exhuma.twn

Hi again,

as soon as I try to make use of the session object inside a
psp-template file, I get the following error:

Mod_python error: PythonHandler mod_python.publisher

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/apache.py, line
299, in HandlerDispatch
result = object(req)

  File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/publisher.py, line
143, in handler
result = str(result)

  File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/psp.py, line 228,
in __str__
self.run()

  File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/psp.py, line 191,
in run
session = Session.Session(req)

  File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/Session.py, line
389, in Session
timeout=timeout, lock=lock)

  File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/Session.py, line
294, in __init__
timeout=timeout, lock=lock)

  File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/Session.py, line
132, in __init__
Cookie.add_cookie(self._req, self.make_cookie())

  File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/Session.py, line
160, in make_cookie
c.path = dirpath[len(docroot):]

TypeError: unsubscriptable object

Any ideas?

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Re: Need design advice. What's my best approach for storing this data?

2006-03-20 Thread Magnus Lycka

Mudcat wrote:
 I am trying to build a tool that analyzes stock data. Therefore I am
 going to download and store quite a vast amount of it. Just for a
 general number - assuming there are about 7000 listed stocks on the two
 major markets plus some extras, 255 tradying days a year for 20 years,
 that is about 36 million entries.
 
 Obviously a database is a logical choice for that. However I've never
 used one, nor do I know what benefits I would get from using one. I am
 worried about speed, memory usage, and disk space.

This is a typical use case for relational database systems.
With something like DB2 or Oracle here, you can take advantage
of more than 20 years of work by lots of developers trying to
solve the kind of problems you will run into.

You haven't really stated all the facts to decide what product
to choose though. Will this be a multi-user applications?
Do you forsee a client/server application? What operating
system(s) do you need to support?

With relational databases, it's plausible to move some of
the hard work in the data analysis into the server. Using
this well means that you need to learn a bit about how
relational databases work, but I think it's with the trouble.
It could mean that much less data ever needs to reach your
Python program for processing, and that will mean a lot for
your performance. Relational databases are very good at
searching, sorting and simple aggregations of data. SQL is
a declarative language, and in principle, your SQL code
will just declare the correct queries and manipulations that
you want to achieve, and tuning will be a separate activity,
which doesn't need to involve program changes. In reality,
there are certainly cases where changes in SQL code will
influence performance, but to a very large extent, you can
achieve good performance through building indices and by
letting the database gather statistics and analyze the
queries your programs contain. As a bonus, you also have
advanced systems for security, transactional safety, on-
line backup, replication etc.

You don't get these advantages with any other data storage
systems.

I'd get Chris Fehily's SQL Visual Quickstart Guide, which
is as good as his Python book. As database, it depends a bit
on your platform you work with. I'd avoid MySQL. Some friends
of mine have used it for needs similar to yours, and they are
now running into its severe shortcomings. (I did warn them.)

For Windows, I think the single user version of SQL Server
(MSDE?) is gratis. For both Windows and Linux/Unix, there are
(I think) gratis versions of both Oracle 10g, IBM DB2 UDB and
Mimer SQL. Mimer SQL is easy to install, Oracle is a pain, and
I think DB2 is somewhere in between. PostgreSQL is also a good
option.

Either way, it certainly seems natural to learn relational
databases and SQL if you want to work with financial software.
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Re: Keeping a function from taking to long--threads?

2006-03-20 Thread Steve Holden

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Thanks, however, I forgot to mention that I'm using windows, and from what
 I've tried, the setdefaulttimeout function doesn't work on my machine.
 Again, thanks for your help!
 Brandon McGinty
 
What version of Python are you running? Under 3.4 setdefaulttimeout() 
works perfectly well on my Windows system.

If you are running 2.3 or earlier, you may want to use Timothy 
O'Malley's timeoutsocket module instead.

However, you seem to be assuming that socket.gethostbyaddr() will report 
on the existence of systems, which I don't think it will - that function 
is for converting IP addresses to names:

   import socket
   socket.gethostbyaddr(127.0.0.1)
('localhost', [], ['127.0.0.1'])
   socket.gethostbyaddr(192.168.10.215)
('bigboy.lan', [], ['192.168.10.215'])
   socket.gethostbyaddr(82.165.194.52)
('perfora.net', [], ['82.165.194.52'])
  

So it will tell you something about the DNS service's content rather 
than the existence or non-existence of systems at a particular IP address.

regards
  Steve
-- 
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Holden Web LLC/Ltd www.holdenweb.com
Love me, love my blog holdenweb.blogspot.com

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Re: ANNOUNCE: xlrd 0.5.2 -- extract data from Excel spreadsheets

2006-03-20 Thread jcmendez

John

Thanks for walking us through the comparison.  On the xlrd website I
saw that it does not import formulas from the Excel files, which is
what I'm looking for.  Any suggestions?

Juan C.

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Re: mod_python + publisher + psp + session problems

2006-03-20 Thread grahamd


exhuma.twn wrote:
 Hi again,

 as soon as I try to make use of the session object inside a
 psp-template file, I get the following error:

 Mod_python error: PythonHandler mod_python.publisher

 Traceback (most recent call last):

   File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/apache.py, line
 299, in HandlerDispatch
 result = object(req)

   File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/publisher.py, line
 143, in handler
 result = str(result)

   File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/psp.py, line 228,
 in __str__
 self.run()

   File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/psp.py, line 191,
 in run
 session = Session.Session(req)

   File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/Session.py, line
 389, in Session
 timeout=timeout, lock=lock)

   File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/Session.py, line
 294, in __init__
 timeout=timeout, lock=lock)

   File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/Session.py, line
 132, in __init__
 Cookie.add_cookie(self._req, self.make_cookie())

   File /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/Session.py, line
 160, in make_cookie
 c.path = dirpath[len(docroot):]

 TypeError: unsubscriptable object

 Any ideas?

Upgrade to mod_python 3.2.8 and your problem will go away.

See:

  http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MODPYTHON-50

I suggest that in future you use the mod_python mailing list for
questions
as that is where most knowledgeable people on mod_python hang out.

Graham

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Re: Pycrypto - active ??

2006-03-20 Thread Paul Rubin

dirvine [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
 I just wonder if the project itself is active and more recent docs
 exist to answer some of the questions I have posed.
 
 I certainly hope theres some answers.

You mentioned TLS/SSL, so I hope you do know about http://trevp.com/tlslite. 
But that doesn't answer your immediate question about Pycrypto.
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Re: combining mod_python handlers publisher and psp problem

2006-03-20 Thread grahamd

You could also have done:

   def index(req, name='John'):
  s = 'Hello, there!'
  if name:
 names = ['a', 'b', 'c']
 s = 'Hello, %s!' % name.capitalize()
 tmpl = psp.PSP(req, filename='index.psp')
 req.content_type = 'text/html'
 tmpl.run(vars = { 'greet': s, 'names': names })
  return

Try the mod_python mailing list if you want an explaination of why.

Graham

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Re: ANNOUNCE: xlrd 0.5.2 -- extract data from Excel spreadsheets

On 20/03/2006 9:28 PM, jcmendez wrote:
 John
 
 Thanks for walking us through the comparison.  On the xlrd website I
 saw that it does not import formulas from the Excel files, which is
 what I'm looking for.  Any suggestions?
 
 Juan C.
 
Juan, what do you want to do with the formulas after importing them? 
Pretty-print them? Evaluate them?
Cheers,
John
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Re: Programming challenge: wildcard exclusion in cartesian products

2006-03-20 Thread Dinko Tenev

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 It would seem that your program is just filtering the full cartesian
 product, right? The solution I'm looking for generates the elements
 one-by-one so that it could be used in a loop.

OK, having read some of the comments so far, I have the feeling that I
may be missing the point in more than one way, so let's set this
straight:

If I understand correctly, for an alphabet S, and a subset W of S*
specified by the wildcards, you expect the enumeration of sequences of
length n to run in Theta( n*|S^n - W| ) instead of Theta( n*|S^n| ).

First, this doesn't seem to hold for your Python program.  Try, for
example, S = { a, b, c }, W = { *a*b*, *b*c*, *c*a*, *b*a*, *c*b*,
*a*c* }, with some large values of n.  Theta( n*|S^n - W| ) predicts
that the enumeration time should grow linearly with n, as |S^n - W| =
3, but if you take some measurements, you'd notice that it grows faster
than that.

Second, my current bet is that such an improvement in asymptotic
complexity is not possible, if we consider *both* pre-processing of the
wildcard set and subsequent enumeration.  Speculation: the time for
building-up a smart structure to speed-up enumeration, together with
the time for enumerating the set using that structure, should sum up to
roughly Theta( n*|S^n| ), even with a really smart algorithm.

Even if you're willing to pay up-front for tighter loop execution
later, and you build a suitable structure for this purpose, you would
have to consider the structure's size, so here's another speculation:
such structure would likely take up Theta( |S^n| ) space in memory, in
the worst case.

I would really appreciate it if you could pour some light into what
you're trying to do exactly, and possibly point out anything that I
might have missed so far.

Cheers,

Dinko

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Re: Chained Comparisons

And firing up a news client, posting a message, and /waiting/ for a
response isn't? In most cases, you could have read half the language
reference manual in the time it takes to get an online response.

No, it isn't because you continue reading the same stuff and you have
the stuff open in another window at the same point you left reading it.
That point is not lost. Posting a question in the newsgroup is like
asking someone else; asking some other person to help you out and it
works better than searching the documentation and loosing your train of
thought.

Besides, one doesn't stop reading the help file after posting a
question on the newsgroup until the answer comes. The reading goes on.




and what exactly do you think the other people in the forum do? They go off
and read the documentation so that they can be sure to quote it back
accurately to you. So you've saved yourself the bother of looking up
the
docs just so that a large number of people can all do it for you.

No, I see the people in this forum engage in trivia instead of
understanding a beginner's anxiety, they engage in these flame wars on
trivial issues.

OK, let me calm down. People here are helpful, too. Python is a new
language for me. I've been programming for over eight years now and
have been there, done that on other forums where I saw a beginner.
Sometimes, a few posts as a beginner can be a bitch.



I've tried reading this several times and can't make sense of what you are 
trying to say?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog22.html

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Re: ANNOUNCE: xlrd 0.5.2 -- extract data from Excel spreadsheets

2006-03-20 Thread jcmendez

Hi John

I'd like to create a dependency graph and plot it with Graphviz.  I've
played a bit with exporting the sheet in XML format, and parsing the
XML.  That somehow works, but it would be much better if the users
wouldn't need to save as the sheets, just put them is a shared
directory where I can get them with the script.

Thanks!!

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Re: Is there no end to Python?

2006-03-20 Thread Magnus Lycka

John Salerno wrote:
 But isn't Python sort of known for the opposite, i.e. 'one simple way', 
 or something to that effect?

If we compare it with the opposite language--Perl, and think
of these languages as natural languages, rather than programming
languages, Perl's inventor Larry Wall, felt that having a lot of
synonymns and allowing a lot of flexibility in word order etc,
would make it easier to express one's ideas well.

Python's inventor Guido van Rossum took a different approach. With
fewer synonyms and a less redundant grammer, it will be easier to
master the language, and certainly easier to read texts written by
others.

I don't know, but I suspect that the difference in approach is
rooted in Guido's understanding that we typically spend much more
time reading source code than we spend writing source code.

As it turns out, having fewer synonyms and grammatic variants, does
not make it harder to come up with different solutions to problems.
It rather seems that the lack of complexity that a simpler grammer
leads to makes it much easier to try out different solutions.
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Re: Relative paths in mod_python

2006-03-20 Thread Ivo van der Sangen

On 2006-03-19, Bruno Desthuilliers [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
wrote:
 Ivo van der Sangen a écrit :
 I was wondering if I could use relative paths in a mod_python script. At
 the moment I am defining a constant string
 /path/to/dir/where/script/resides. The problem with this is that when
 I move the script including files I use to get metadata I have to change
 this variable. The same problem occurs when I distribute the script; the
 person using it will first have to modify it, which is not what I want. Is
 it possible that a mod_python script has as current working directory
 the directory where the script resides? At the moment os.getcwd()
 returns '/'.

 You could set this constant in the apache conf as a PythonOption. And/Or 
 you could post this question to mod_python's mailing list !-)

I wasn't aware of the mod_python list. The next time I will post my
question there, but I don't think I will get a better answer there; the
solutions given here so far are fine.
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Re: ANNOUNCE: xlrd 0.5.2 -- extract data from Excel spreadsheets

On 20/03/2006 10:00 PM, jcmendez wrote:
 Hi John
 
 I'd like to create a dependency graph and plot it with Graphviz.  I've
 played a bit with exporting the sheet in XML format, and parsing the
 XML.  That somehow works, but it would be much better if the users
 wouldn't need to save as the sheets, just put them is a shared
 directory where I can get them with the script.
 
 Thanks!!
 

I guess that you need, for each formula cell in a worksheet, a list of 
the cells that are referred to by the formula ... is that correct?


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Re: Chained Comparisons

Sathyaish wrote:

 I) What does the following expression evaluate to?
 
 a  b == c
 
 1) (a  b) and (b == c)
 2) (a  b) or (b == c)

then later

 1) It is easier to learn through an interactive medium like a forum;

There is a convenient alternative to asking basic questions on c.l.py or
ploughing through formal docs. When you have a clear conception of the
possible outcomes it is also reliable.

 1  2 == 3
False

It can't be 'or' then. 
In short, the interactive prompt is *the* tool to learn about language
features and libraries.

Peter
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Re: markup.py - HTML/XML generator

2006-03-20 Thread Gerard Flanagan

Daniel Nogradi wrote:

 Just in case the thought of not having a millionth implementation of a
 HTML/XML generator for Python makes the world as we know it a
 miserable place, well then your suffering might be over soon since
 exactly the one millionth implementation is out. You can download
 markup.py from

 http://markup.sourceforge.net/


(Corrected the link).

You opened a door I was pushing!

I wrote a HTML generator a few weeks ago to generate a static site, but
it was only a little less tortuous to use than writing out the HTML by
hand.  I wanted to do things the way  'markup.py' does but couldn't
manage it. Then I read your code, added straightforward '__getattr__'
and '__call__' methods to my own code, and now I need only half the
'LOC' that I did before.

Before I did this:

page = HtmlPage('Test Page')
left_div = page.append( HtmlElement('div', id='left') )
main_div = page.append( HtmlElement('div', id='main') )
navbar = HtmlElement('ul', css='navbar')
for href,link in {'/home':'Home', '/shop':'Shop',
'/cart':'Cart'}.iteritems():
li = navbar.append( HtmlElement('li') )
li.append( HtmlElement('a',link, href=href) )
left_div.append(navbar)
main_div.append( HtmlElement('h1','Header') )
main_div.append( HtmlElement('p','Text Goes Here') )

Now I can do this:

page = HtmlPage('Test Page')
navbar = page.div(id='left').ul(css='navbar')
for href,link in {'/home':'Home', '/shop':'Shop',
'/cart':'Cart'}.iteritems():
navbar.li.a(link,href=href)
page.div(id='main').h1('Header').p('Text Goes Here')


So *that's* what '__call__' does - I am enlightened!

Thanks a lot.

Here's mine:

http://www.gflanagan.net/site/python/htmlbuilder/htmlbuilder.py

(So, 'More than one million ways to do it' then...)

Gerard

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Re: Chained Comparisons

OK, I get it. Just stop whining endlessly about it, guys. I *do* use
the interpreter. I posted a question here. Sorry, I committed a sin.

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Re: ANNOUNCE: xlrd 0.5.2 -- extract data from Excel spreadsheets

2006-03-20 Thread jcmendez

Exactly.  Once I get the formulas, I can do a weak parsing of them and
find the references.

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Re: ** Operator

2006-03-20 Thread Christoph Zwerschke

Alex Martelli wrote:
 Sathyaish wrote:
 
 I tried it on the interpreter and it looks like it is the to the power
 of operator symbol/function. Can you please point me to the formal
 definition of this operator in the docs?
 
 http://docs.python.org/ref/power.html

I think this should be also mentioned in the Built-In Functions section 
of the Library Reference. Probably most users do not read the Language 
Reference (since the main menu says it's for language lawyers and yes, 
it is not really fun to read).

In the explanation about pow() at 
http://docs.python.org/lib/built-in-funcs.html, the notation 10**2 is 
suddenly used, without explaining that it is equivalent to pow(10,2). I 
think this could be improved in the docs.

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Re: Importing an output from another function

2006-03-20 Thread Magnus Lycka

Byte wrote:
 Now what do I do if Func1() has multiple outputs and Func2() requires
 them all to give its own output, as follows:
 
 import random
 
 def Func1():
 choice = ('A', 'B', 'C')
 output = random.choice(choice)
 output2 = random.choice(choice)
 return output
 return output2
 
 def Func2(item1, item2):
 print item1, item2
 
 output1 = Func1()
 Func2(output1)

Some more options (untested):

def func1(n, choice=('A', 'B', 'C')):
 # n=number of choices
 # choice can now be overridden with
 # other values
 choices = []
 for i in range(n):
 choices.append(random.choice(choice))
 return choices

def func2(choices):
 for choice in choices:
 print choice,
 print

func2(func1(2))

#

class ChoosePrinter(object):
 def __init__(self, to_choose_from=('A', 'B', 'C')):
 self.to_choose_from=to_choose_from
 self.choosen = []
 def get_choices(self, n=2):
 for i in range(n):
 self.choosen.append(random.choice(choice))
 def dump_choosen(self):
 print  .join(self.choosen)
 self.choosen = []

cp = ChoosePrinter()
cp.get_choices(2)
cp.dump_choosen()
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Re: Pycrypto - active ??

2006-03-20 Thread dirvine

Thanks Paul

I will check this out. Perhaps theres a case for pycrypto to be
revamped and perhaps a new python cryptographic page to be created
mentioning all these projects. I have foudn it a bit difficult to find
info on this area. Mny thanks for this though.

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Re: ANNOUNCE: xlrd 0.5.2 -- extract data from Excel spreadsheets

On 20/03/2006 10:37 PM, jcmendez wrote:
 Exactly.

Yes, your requirement is exactly that, a list of references.


  Once I get the formulas, I can do a weak parsing of them and
 find the references.
 

A formula is not stored as input e.g. (A1+A2)*3.0+$Z$29; it's kept as 
an RPN stream of variable-length tokens. You don't need to parse it in 
the sense you were probably thinking of; *ALL* [ho ho chuckle chuckle] 
you need to do is step through the tokens and do something with the ones 
that contain references. Have a peek at this: 
http://sc.openoffice.org/excelfileformat.pdf -- formulas are covered in 
40+ pages starting at about page 25.

Cheers,
John
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Re: Counting number of each item in a list.

2006-03-20 Thread per9000

Dear counters,

I have also encountered the above problem, and I frequently use the two
blocks of code below.

The first one is commented already - except that this version does not
start from an empty dict.

The second inverts the first one. Meaning that a dict in word2hits
style:

my_dict['the'] = 120
my_dict['word'] = 4
...
my_dict['gene'] = 4

becomes a dict in hits2words style:

new_dict[4] = ['word','gene', ...]
new_dict[120] = ['the', ...]

I used these to count genes in in abstracts from pubmed the when I
invented them (but it took some time to remove them from the code and
use them as functions).

def dict_add(indict,inlist,init=1):
  for item in inlist:
if indict.has_key(item):
  indict[item] += 1
else:
  indict[item] = init
  return indict
# end def

def dict_invert(indict):
  new_dict = {}
  for key in indict.keys():
if new_dict.has_key(indict[key]):
  new_dict[indict[key]].append(key)
else:
  new_dict[indict[key]] = [key]
  return new_dict
#end def

A good idea could be to change the header of the first one (if you want
the option to start counting from zero) into:
def dict_add(inlist,indict={},init=1):

/P9K

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Ink

2006-03-20 Thread mshawjr

Sorry guys.  The spam stuff was not my intent.  I do oppoligies and won't
happen again.  I have never been on newsgroups before and not sure how to
work them. I hope you guys can forgive a bad choice.  Murphey
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Re: Chained Comparisons

Sathyaish wrote:

 OK, I get it. Just stop whining endlessly about it, guys. 

Relax. Take what's in it for you and forget about the rest. 

 I *do* use the interpreter. I posted a question here. 

And I showed you an easy way to answer it yourself. Using the interpreter
doesn't seem to be as ingrained in your working style as I trust it will
become if you stick with Python.

 Sorry, I committed a sin.  

Python is a tool, not a religion.

Peter
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Re: Chained Comparisons

Thanks, Peter. I do use the interpreter alongside while reading the
documentation and also try out the examples. It was just a matter of
chance that for this particular situation, I did not.

Thank you for the answers, everyone. I hope I am still welcome here for
more questions.

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Re: Counting number of each item in a list.

per9000 wrote:

 A good idea could be to change the header of the first one (if you want
 the option to start counting from zero) into:
 def dict_add(inlist,indict={},init=1):

make that

def dict_add(inlist, indict=None, init=1):
if indict is None:
indict = {}

See 5. Mutable default arguments at
http://zephyrfalcon.org/labs/python_pitfalls.html for an explanation.

Peter
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compile function and future statements

2006-03-20 Thread Fuzzyman

Hello all,

The following is a copy of a blog entry. It's asking a question about
future statements and the built in compile function. I'd appreciate any
pointers or comments about possible approaches.

`Movable Python http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/movpy/`_ supports
running both Python scripts and ``.pyc`` bytecode files. It does this
by compiling scripts to bytecode, or extracting the code object from
bytecode files, and then calling ``exec``.

When you call `compile
http://docs.python.org/dev/lib/built-in-funcs.html`_ you can pass in
an optional ``flags`` argument which tell Python which future
statements to compile the code with. I currently don't do this, which
means that ``from __future__ import ...`` statements are ignored.

For Python 2.4.2 the most significant of these is `division
http://www.python.org/doc/peps/pep-0238/`_. Code which expects
integer division to yield floats is just plain broken if this future
statement is ignored.

I'd like to fix this in the next release of **Movable Python**.

First of all, I *assume* that the code objects contained in bytecode
files are already compiled with the relevant future statements. This
would mean that no further action is necessary. Can anyone confirm if
this is correct ? [#]_

For Python scripts there are a couple of possible approaches.

The simplest approach would be to use a simple regular expression to
find statements that look like
``from __future__ ...``. Unfortunately this could score false positives
for comments and docstrings. [#]_

Another alternative would be to parse the code into an abstract syntax
tree using the `compiler module
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-compiler.html`_. I would then have
to recognise the import statements in the nodes. I can see that there
is an `Import node
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-compiler.ast.html`_ does anyone
have any hints for me with this approach ? I would prefer a solution
that works across Python versions 2.2 to 2.5 and beyond.

Ominously, the ``compile.compile`` function has unsupported options for
passing in ``flags``, so it looks like it doesn't handle it
automatically from the parse tree.

.. [#] It will actually be easy enough to test.
.. [#] Future statements shuld only occur at the toplevel of code, and
in fact ought to occur before any other statements (although that was
broken in Python 2.4), so it ought to be possible to minimize false
positives a bit.

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Re: ** Operator

Thanks very much for helping out, Christopher.

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py2exe 0.6.5 released

2006-03-20 Thread Jimmy Retzlaff

py2exe 0.6.5 released
=

py2exe is a Python distutils extension which converts Python scripts
into executable Windows programs, able to run without requiring a
Python installation. Console and Windows (GUI) applications, Windows
NT services, exe and dll COM servers are supported.

Changes in 0.6.5:

* Fixed modulefinder / mf related bugs introduced in 0.6.4. This
  will be most evident when working with things like
  win32com.shell and xml.xpath.

* Files no longer keep read-only attributes when they are copied
  as this was causing problems with the copying of some MS DLLs.

Changes in 0.6.4:

* New skip-archive option which copies the Python bytecode files
  directly into the dist directory and subdirectories - no
  archive is used.

* An experimental new custom-boot-script option which allows a
  boot script to be specified (e.g., --custom-boot-script=cbs.py)
  which can do things like installing a customized stdout
  blackhole. See py2exe's boot_common.py for examples of what can
  be done. The custom boot script is executed during startup of
  the executable immediately after boot_common.py is executed.

* Thomas Heller's performance improvements for finding needed
  modules.

* Mark Hammond's fix for thread-state errors when a py2exe
  created executable tries to use a py2exe created COM DLL.

Changes in 0.6.3:

* First release assembled by py2exe's new maintainer, Jimmy
  Retzlaff. Code changes in this release are from Thomas Heller
  and Gordon Scott.

* The dll-excludes option is now available on the command line.
  It was only possible to specify that in the options argument to
  the setup function before.

  The dll-excludes option can now be used to filter out dlls like
  msvcr71.dll or even w9xpopen.exe.

* Fix from Gordon Scott: py2exe crashed copying extension modules
  in packages.

Changes in 0.6.2:

* Several important bugfixes:

  - bundled extensions in packages did not work correctly, this
made the wxPython single-file sample fail with newer wxPython
versions.

  - occasionally dlls/pyds were loaded twice, with very strange
effects.

  - the source distribution was not complete.

  - it is now possible to build a debug version of py2exe.

Changes in 0.6.1:

* py2exe can now bundle binary extensions and dlls into the
  library-archive or the executable itself.  This allows to
  finally build real single-file executables.

  The bundled dlls and pyds are loaded at runtime by some special
  code that emulates the Windows LoadLibrary function - they are
  never unpacked to the file system.

  This part of the code is distributed under the MPL 1.1, so this
  license is now pulled in by py2exe.

* By default py2exe now includes the codecs module and the
  encodings package.

* Several other fixes.

Homepage:

http://www.py2exe.org

Download from the usual location:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=15583

Enjoy,
Jimmy
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Re: cmp() on integers - is there guarantee of returning only +-1 or 0?

2006-03-20 Thread Christoph Zwerschke

Alex Martelli wrote:
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Why not

 def sign(n):
 return n and n/abs(n) or 0
 
 If you assume n is a number, the 'or 0' appears redundant (if you don't
 so assume, then the abs(n) and the division are doubtful;-).

Without the 'or 0' it is also more consistent with the behavior of your 
function that the sign of a float is also a float.

One issue is that division should be normally avoided because it is a 
costly operation and can lead to rounding errors. Maybe performance is 
is not a problem for ints and floats, but if you are planning to use the 
function on long ints, I would consider using something like:

def sign(x): return x0 and 1 or x0 and -1 or 0

def sign(x): return (x0)-(x0)

-- Christoph
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Re: Chained Comparisons

2006-03-20 Thread Steve Holden

Sathyaish wrote:
 Thanks, Peter. I do use the interpreter alongside while reading the
 documentation and also try out the examples. It was just a matter of
 chance that for this particular situation, I did not.
 
 Thank you for the answers, everyone. I hope I am still welcome here for
 more questions.
 
Absolutely no reason why not. You'll be answering them before long. 
Welcome to c.l.py.

regards
  Steve
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compile function and future statements

2006-03-20 Thread Fuzzyman

Hello all,

The following is a copy of a blog entry. It's asking a question about
future statements and the built in compile function. I'd appreciate any
pointers or comments about possible approaches.

`Movable Python http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/movpy/`_ supports
running both Python scripts and ``.pyc`` bytecode files. It does this
by compiling scripts to bytecode, or extracting the code object from
bytecode files, and then calling ``exec``.

When you call `compile
http://docs.python.org/dev/lib/built-in-funcs.html`_ you can pass in
an optional ``flags`` argument which tell Python which future
statements to compile the code with. I currently don't do this, which
means that ``from __future__ import ...`` statements are ignored.

For Python 2.4.2 the most significant of these is `division
http://www.python.org/doc/peps/pep-0238/`_. Code which expects
integer division to yield floats is just plain broken if this future
statement is ignored.

I'd like to fix this in the next release of **Movable Python**.

First of all, I *assume* that the code objects contained in bytecode
files are already compiled with the relevant future statements. This
would mean that no further action is necessary. Can anyone confirm if
this is correct ? [#]_

For Python scripts there are a couple of possible approaches.

The simplest approach would be to use a simple regular expression to
find statements that look like
``from __future__ ...``. Unfortunately this could score false positives
for comments and docstrings. [#]_

Another alternative would be to parse the code into an abstract syntax
tree using the `compiler module
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-compiler.html`_. I would then have
to recognise the import statements in the nodes. I can see that there
is an `Import node
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-compiler.ast.html`_ does anyone
have any hints for me with this approach ? I would prefer a solution
that works across Python versions 2.2 to 2.5 and beyond.

Ominously, the ``compile.compile`` function has unsupported options for
passing in ``flags``, so it looks like it doesn't handle it
automatically from the parse tree.

.. [#] It will actually be easy enough to test.
.. [#] Future statements shuld only occur at the toplevel of code, and
in fact ought to occur before any other statements (although that was
broken in Python 2.4), so it ought to be possible to minimize false
positives a bit.

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Re: String comparison question

2006-03-20 Thread luc . saffre

Michael Spencer wrote:
 Olivier Langlois wrote:

  I would like to make a string comparison that would return true without
  regards of the number of spaces and new lines chars between the words
 
  like 'A   B\nC' = 'A\nBC'

Here is how I do such comparisons:

  if a.strip().split() == b.strip().split()

Luc

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Re: Ink

2006-03-20 Thread Steve Holden

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Sorry guys.  The spam stuff was not my intent.  I do oppoligies and won't
 happen again.  I have never been on newsgroups before and not sure how to
 work them. I hope you guys can forgive a bad choice.  Murphey

A gracious apology wipes out the sin.

regards
  Steve
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Re: cmp() on integers - is there guarantee of returning only +-1 or 0?

2006-03-20 Thread Paul Rubin

Christoph Zwerschke [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
 def sign(x): return (x0)-(x0)

Cute, I'll try to remember that one.
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Re: String comparison question