[Python-Dev] SWIG and rlcompleter

[Fernando Perez]

Guido van Rossum wrote:

> (3) I think a better patch is to use str(word)[:n] instead of word[:n].

Mmh, I'm not so sure that's a good idea, as it leads to this:

In [1]: class f: pass
   ...:

In [2]: a=f()

In [3]: a.__dict__[1] = 8

In [4]: a.x = 0

In [5]: a.<TAB HIT HERE>
a.1  a.x

In [5]: a.1
------------------------------------------------------------
   File "<console>", line 1
     a.1
       ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax


In general, foo.x named attribute access is only valid for strings to begin with
(what about unicode in there?).  Instead, this is what I've actually
implemented in ipython:

        words = [w for w in dir(object) if isinstance(w, basestring)]

That does allow unicode, I'm not sure if that's a good thing to do.

Cheers,

f