On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 4:15 PM Soni L. <fakedme+py@gmail.com> wrote:
I generally do that but I was frustrated and exhausted. That is, that may have been slightly passive-aggressive... Sorry.
and yet you barely trimmed this one ;-) in any case the whole thing I'm arguing for in this thread, is to *draw
parallels* between module imports and resource imports.
The problem I see with all this is that there isn't much of a parallel -- modules can only contain Python objects, and, like the title of this thread indicates, the only two python objects that directly map to a file are strings and bytes. You *may* be able to do something directly with strings, but most likely you'll pass it off to something else: a template renderer, JSON parser, what have you. And I can’t think of a single instance where you would just want the bytes in a file without processing them into a Python object. Given that you have to do that next step anyway, I don't see much gain here. That is: what’s wrong with hard-coding, say, a template into Python source and assigning it a string? And we DO have importlib and setuptools solutions already -- if you really think they're useful, then better documentation is in order. That being said, I have wanted to put resources in with my Python code, for two reasons: 1) It’s easier to bundle them up with the package (I used to use py2exe and the like a lot) 2) it’s nice to be able to simply import something and have the Python object I want right away. For (1): this is made easier by the current packaging solutions — it could be a bit cleaner (messing around with __file__ is pretty ugly) — so by all means explore the available solutions and maybe make a better one. For (2) — see above— I want the relevant Python object, not just the string or bytes. A good example of this is the utilities (img2py I think) that come with wxPython: They bundle up a set of images into a Python module that creates wxImages on the fly. So you can import the module, and have a set of wxImages ready to go. That is pretty nice. I do think there could be some utilities to make that kind of thing easier, but making it easy, with a built in, to simply get the bytes or text from a file wouldn’t buy us much. -CHB -- Christopher Barker, PhD Python Language Consulting - Teaching - Scientific Software Development - Desktop GUI and Web Development - wxPython, numpy, scipy, Cython -- Christopher Barker, PhD Python Language Consulting - Teaching - Scientific Software Development - Desktop GUI and Web Development - wxPython, numpy, scipy, Cython