[New-bugs-announce] [issue21044] tempfile.TemporaryFile() shouldn't have a name attribute

[Antoine Pietri]

New submission from Antoine Pietri:

The fact that tempfile.TemporaryFile() has a "name" integer attribute  causes weird behavior when interacting with libraries that rely on this attribute being a valid string for file objects.
For instance, it led to this exception with the "tarfile" module, which I resolved by using a NamedTemporaryFile():

>>> tarfile.open(fileobj=tempfile.TemporaryFile(), mode='w')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/tarfile.py", line 1585, in open
    return cls.taropen(name, mode, fileobj, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/tarfile.py", line 1595, in taropen
    return cls(name, mode, fileobj, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/tarfile.py", line 1431, in __init__
    self.name = os.path.abspath(name) if name else None
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/posixpath.py", line 360, in abspath
    if not isabs(path):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/posixpath.py", line 64, in isabs
    return s.startswith(sep)
AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute 'startswith'

Which is caused by these lines in the "tarfile" module:

if name is None and hasattr(fileobj, "name"):
    name = fileobj.name

If TemporaryFile() didn't have a name attribute, tarfile, which doesn't really need the file name, would simply have continued without errors.

I am not aware of any place where this "name" integer attribute is actually useful, and, as a matter of fact, it is not even documented: http://docs.python.org/3.4/library/tempfile.html#tempfile.TemporaryFile

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 214662
nosy: seirl
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: tempfile.TemporaryFile() shouldn't have a name attribute
type: behavior
versions: Python 3.3, Python 3.4

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue21044>
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