"only be used by engineers/scientists for research" Famous last words. I know plenty of scientists who would love to "do research" with an exposed eval(). Full disclosure, I personally added a security hole into matplotlib thinking I covered all my bases in protecting an eval() statement. Ben Root On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 4:21 PM, djxvillain wrote:

This will not be a public product and will only be used by other engineers/scientists for research. I don't think security should be a huge issue, but I appreciate your input and concern for the quality of my code.

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Perhaps the numexpr package might be safer? Not exactly meant for this situation (meant for optimizations), but the evaluator is pretty darn safe. Ben Root On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 5:33 PM, John Ladasky wrote:

This isn't just a Numpy issue. You are interested in Python's eval().

Keep in mind that any programming language that blurs the line between code and data (many do not) has a potential security vulnerability. What if your user doesn't type

"x = 2*np.sin(2*np.pi*44100*t+np.pi/2)"

but instead types this:

"import os ; os.remove('/home')"

I do NOT recommend that you eval() the second statement.

You can try to write code which traps unwanted input before you eval() it. It's apparently quite hard to stop everything bad from getting through.

On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 12:58 PM, djxvillain wrote:

...

Hello all,

I am an electrical engineer and new to numpy. I need the ability to take in user input, and use that input as a variable. For example:

t = input('enter t: ') x = input('enter x: ')

I need the user to be able to enter something like x = 2*np.sin(2*np.pi*44100*t+np.pi/2) and it be the same as if they just typed it in the .py file. There's no clean way to cast or evaluate it that I've found.

I could make a function to parse this string character by character, but I figured this is probably a common problem and someone else has probably figured it out and created an object for it. I can't find a library that does it though.

If I can provide any more information please let me know. Thank you in advance for your help.

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-- *John J. Ladasky Jr., Ph.D.* *Research Scientist* *International Technological University* *2711 N. First St, San Jose, CA 95134 USA*

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