[New-bugs-announce] [issue5857] Return namedtuples from tokenize token generator

[Vaibhav Mallya]

New submission from Vaibhav Mallya <mallyvai at umich.edu>:

Returning an anonymous 5-tuple seems like a suboptimal interface since
it's so easy to accidentally confuse, for example, the indices of start
and end. I've used tokenize.py for several scripts in the past few weeks
and I've always ended up writing some sort of wrapper function for
generate_tokens that names the returned tuple's fields to help me avoid
mistakes like this.

I'd like to propose the following patch that simply decorates the
generate_token function and names its return values' fields. Since it's
a namedtuple, it should be fully backwards compatible with the existing
interface, but also allow member access via 

next_token.type
next_token.string
next_token.start.row, next_token.start.col
next_token.end.row, next_token.end.col
next_token.line

If this seems like a reasonable way to do things, I'd be happy to submit
relevant doc patches as well as the corresponding patch for 3.0.

----------
components: Library (Lib)
files: mallyvai_tokenize.patch
keywords: patch
messages: 86691
nosy: mallyvai
severity: normal
status: open
title: Return namedtuples from tokenize token generator
type: feature request
versions: Python 2.6, Python 2.7, Python 3.0, Python 3.1
Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file13797/mallyvai_tokenize.patch

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