[Python-ideas] `to_file()` method for strings

[Alexander Belopolsky]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 11:33 PM, Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas <
python-ideas at python.org> wrote:

> Anyway, another huge advantage of this proposal is that it can handle
> atomic writes properly. After all, even novices can quickly learn this:
>
>     with open(path, 'w') as f:
>         f.write(s)
>
> ... but how many of them can even understand this:
>
>     with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile('w', dir=os.path.dirname(path),
> delete=False) as f:
>         f.write(s)
>         f.flush()
>         os.replace(f.path, path)
>

This would be a reasonable addition as a pathlib.Path method.

>
> (That's assuming I even got the latter right. I'm on my phone right now,
> so I can't check, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a mistake there...)
>

You've got it wrong, but I understand what you tried to achieve.  Note that
the "write to temp and move" trick may not work if your /tmp and your path
are mounted on different filesystems.  And with some filesystems it may not
work at all, but I agree that it would be nice to have a state of the art
atomic write method somewhere in stdlib.
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