Python 3 does not recognize special characters - python-3.x

This is the app.py file.
#!/usr/bin/python3
import sys
def run():
print(sys.argv)
filename = sys.argv[1]
print(filename)
return
if __name__ == '__main__':
run()
I want to run this code from the command line, so I tried the two following lines each.
python3 app.py input.txt
python3 app.py < input.txt
The first command showed the result I expected, which is ['app.py', 'input.txt']. However the second command just ended up showing ['app.py'].
It seems like the Python code does not recognize the special symbols. How can I make the script recognize them without changing the script itself? i.e. not modifying the command like this: python3 app.py '<' input.txt.

The < character is special and will actually stream the file specified to stdin. You cannot override this behavior as it comes from your shell not python itself. Here is an example of what is really happening, and how you can get the file contents.
import sys
file_contents = sys.stdin.read() # This will read the entire stdin stream into file_contents
This will also work for the | character
echo "Hello, World" | python app.py

Related

Python script does not print output as supposed

I have a very simple (test) code which I'm running either from a Linux shell, or in interactive mode, and I have two different behaviours I cannot figure out the reason of.
I have a file generated by a Popen call, previously, where each line is a file path. This is the code used to generate the file:
with open('find.txt','w') as f:
find = subprocess.Popen(["find",".","-name","myfile.out"],stdout=f)
(Incidentally, I was trying to build a PIPE originally, namely inputting the output of this command to a grep command, and since I wasn't successful in any way, I decided to break the problem down and just read the file paths from a file, and process them one by one. So maybe there is a common issue that is blocking me somewhere in this procedure).
Since in this second step I wasn't even able to open and process the files by opening the addresses contained in each line of the find.txt file, I just tried to print the file lines out, because for sure they're available in there:
with open('find.txt','r') as g:
for l in g.readlines():
print(l)
Now, the interesting part:
if I paste the lines above into a python shell, everything works fine and I get my outputs as expected
if, on the other hand, I try to run python test.py, where test.py is the name of the file containing the lines above, no output appears in the shell's stdout.
I've tried sys.stdout.flush() to no avail. I've also inserted some dummy print() statements along the way: everything gets printed but what's after the g.readlines() statement.
Here's the full script I'm trying to make work (a pre-precursor of what I'm actually after, tbh).
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import subprocess
import sys
with open('find.txt','w') as f:
find = subprocess.Popen(["find",".","-name","myfile.out"],stdout=f)
print('hello')
with open('find.txt','r') as g:
print('hello?')
for l in g.readlines():
print('help me!')
print(l)
sys.stdout.flush()
output being:
{ancis:>106> python test.py
hello
hello?
{ancis:>106>
EDIT
I've quickly tried the very same lines (but without the call to find, which isn't available) on my python installation in Windows: it works as expected)
Based on that, I've tried to run the simpler code below:
print('hello')
with open('find.txt','r') as g:
print('hello?')
for l in g.readlines():
print('help me!')
print(l)
sys.stdout.flush()
as a script, in Linux - This also works w/o problems.
This should mean that somehow I'm messing things up with the call to Popen... But what?
This is a race condition.
Your call to
find = subprocess.Popen(["find",".","-name","myfile.out"],stdout=f)
is opening another process and running your find command which takes a bit of time to fully execute.
Python then continues on and reaches the reading of the file portion before the command is fully executed and the file is generated.
Want to test it out?
Add a time.sleep(1) just before the opening of the file.
Full test script:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import subprocess
import time
with open('find.txt','w') as f:
find = subprocess.Popen(["find",".","-name","myfile.out"],stdout=f)
time.sleep(1)
with open('find.txt','r') as g:
for l in g:
print(l)
To block until the process is complete you can use find.communicate().
With this you can also optionally set a timeout if that's something that you want.
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import subprocess
with open('find.txt','w') as f:
find = subprocess.Popen(["find",".","-name","myfile.out"],stdout=f)
find.communicate()
with open('find.txt','r') as g:
for l in g:
print(l)
Source:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.Popen.communicate

isatty() always returning False?

I want to pipe data via stdin to a Python script for onwards processing. The command is:
tail -f /home/pi/ALL.TXT | python3 ./logcheck.py
And the Python code is:
import sys
while 1:
if (sys.stdin.isatty()):
for line in sys.stdin:
print(line)
I want the code to continuously watch stdin and then process each row when received. The tail command is working when run on its own but the python script never outputs anything.
Checking isatty() it appears to always return False?
Help!
A TTY is when you use your regular terminal - as in opening up a python in your shell, and typing
BASH>python
>>>from sys import stdin
>>>stdin.isatty() #True
In your case the standard input is coming from something which is not a tty. Just add a not in the if statement.

Can i access the variables of the python script after run that python script with console?

I run the python script using terminal command
python3 myScript.py
It's simply run my program but if i want to open python console after complete run of my script so that i can access my script's variables.
So, What should i do ? and How can i get my script's variables after run the code using terminal ?
Open a python terminal (type 'python' in cmd);
Paste this (replace 'myScript.py' with your script filename):
def run():
t = ""
with open('myScript.py') as f:
t = f.read()
return t
Type exec(run()). Now you will have access to the variables defined in myScript.py.
I needed to do this so I could explore the result of a request from the requests library, without having to paste the code to make the requests every time.
Make the program run the other program you want with the variables as arguments. For example:
#program1
var1=7
var2="hi"
import os
os.system("python %s %d %s" % (filename, var1, var2))
#program2
import sys
#do something such as:
print(sys.argv[1]) #for var1
print(sys.argv[2]) #for var2
Basically, you are running program2 with arguments that can be referenced later.
Hope this helps :)

How do I print the output of the exec() function in python 3.5?

How do I have it so that you pass in a python command to the exec() command, waits for completion, and print out the output of everything that just happened?
Many of the code out there uses StringIO, something that is not included in Python 3.5.
You can't. Exec just executes in place and returns nothing. Your best bet would be to write the command into a script and execute it with subprocess if you really want to catch all the output.
Here's an example for you:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
from sys import argv, executable
from tempfile import NamedTemporaryFile
from subprocess import check_output
with NamedTemporaryFile(mode='w') as file:
file.write('\n'.join(argv[1:]))
file.write('\n')
file.flush()
output = check_output([executable, file.name])
print('output from command: {}'.format(output))
And running it:
$ ./catchandrun.py 'print("hello world!")'
output from command: b'hello world!\n'
$

Testing python programs without using python shell

I would like to easily test my python programs without constantly using the python shell since each time the program is modified you have to quit, re-enter the python shell and import the program again. I am using a 2012 Macbook pro with OSX. I have the following code:
import sys
def read_strings(filename):
with open(filename) as file:
return file.read().split('>')[1:0]
file1 = sys.argv[1]
filename = read_strings(file1)
Essentially I would like to read into and split a txt file containing:
id1>id2>id3>id4
I am entering this into my command line:
pal-nat184-102-127:python_stuff ceb$ python3 program.py string.txt
However when I try the sys.argv approach on the command line my program returns nothing. Is this a good approach to testing code, could anyone point me in the correct direction?
This is what I would like to happen:
pal-nat184-102-127:python_stuff ceb$ python3 program.py string.txt
['id1', 'id2', 'id3', 'id4']
Let's take this a piece at a time:
However when I try the sys.argv approach on the command line my
program returns nothing
The final result of your program is that it writes a string into the variable filename. It's a little strange to have a program "return" a value. Generally, you want a program to print it's something out or save something to a file. I'm guessing it would ease your debugging if you modified your program by adding,
print (filename)
at the end: you'd be able to see the result of your program.
could anyone point me in the correct direction?
One other debugging note: It can be useful to write your .py files so that they can be run both independently at the command line or in a python shell. How you've currently structured your code, this will work semi-poorly. (Starting a shell and then importing your file will cause an error because sys.argv[1] isn't defined.)
A solution to this is to change your the bottom section of your code as follows:
if __name__ == '__main__':
file1 = sys.argv[1]
filename = read_strings(file1)
The if guard at the top says, "If running as a standalone script, then run what's below me. If you imported me from some place else, then do not execute what's below me."
Feel free to follow up below if I misinterpreted your question.
You never do anything with the result of read_strings. Try:
print(read_strings(file1))

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