On Friday 14 March 2003 02:47 am, Andrew McNamara wrote:

Line oriented network protocols are very common, and I often find myself calling the socket makefile method so I can read complete lines from a socket. I'm probably not the first one who's wished that socket objects where more file-like.

While I don't think we'd want to go as far as to turn them into a stdio based file object, it might make sense to allow them to be iterated over (and add a .readline() method, I guess). This would necessitate adding some input buffering, which will complicate things like the .recv() method, so I'm not sure it's that good an idea, but it removes one gotchya for neophytes (and forgetful veterans). Thoughts?

I've had occasion to code a "socket that turns into a filelike object at need" (back in Python 2.0, I believe) and I used something like (can't find the original code, but AFAIR it was a bit like the following): class richsocket: def __init__(self, sock, *args): self.sock = socket.socket(*args) self.file = None def __getattr__(self, name): try: result = getattr(self.sock, name) except AttributeError: pass else: return result if self.file is None: self.file = self.sock.makefile() return getattr(self.file, name) This has some issues (e.g. method close goes to self.sock when it should probably go to self.file if not None; plus, the buffering issues you mention, etc), but nothing that looks too hard to fix -- in my use case I applied AGNI and never needed any more than this simple and smooth "double alternate delegation" pattern. Today, if type socket supports inheritance (haven't checked), it should be even easier, I suspect. Alex

On Friday 14 March 2003 02:47 am, Andrew McNamara wrote:

Line oriented network protocols are very common, and I often find myself calling the socket makefile method so I can read complete lines from a socket. I'm probably not the first one who's wished that socket objects where more file-like.

While I don't think we'd want to go as far as to turn them into a stdio based file object, it might make sense to allow them to be iterated over (and add a .readline() method, I guess). This would necessitate adding some input buffering, which will complicate things like the .recv() method, so I'm not sure it's that good an idea, but it removes one gotchya for neophytes (and forgetful veterans). Thoughts?

I've had occasion to code a "socket that turns into a filelike object at need" (back in Python 2.0, I believe) and I used something like (can't find the original code, but AFAIR it was a bit like the following): class richsocket: def __init__(self, sock, *args): self.sock = socket.socket(*args) self.file = None def __getattr__(self, name): try: result = getattr(self.sock, name) except AttributeError: pass else: return result if self.file is None: self.file = self.sock.makefile() return getattr(self.file, name) This has some issues (e.g. method close goes to self.sock when it should probably go to self.file if not None; plus, the buffering issues you mention, etc), but nothing that looks too hard to fix -- in my use case I applied AGNI and never needed any more than this simple and smooth "double alternate delegation" pattern. Today, if type socket supports inheritance (haven't checked), it should be even easier, I suspect. Alex