just another default argument value gotcha

[Michael Hudson]

fBechmann at web.de (Frank Bechmann) writes:

> Eventually most of you will not learn much from this because it's just
> another event in the 'default argument value gotcha' series, but
> because it cost me some hours yesterday to spot this 'error' in a
> famous python tool I thought it might still help other people to save
> some time.
> 
> I tried to use some method which was documented to write to
> 'sys.stdout' per default so that changing 'sys.stdout' to bind to
> another object should allow to get grip on the method's output. but
> that didn't work - reason was that that 'sys.stdout' was used as
> default argument value for the method. 

FWIW, I think this is precisely the reason that "print >>None, ..."
prints to sys.stdout.  It lets you write

> The following code describes it better then my english can do, so as
> it seems for me, one should make sure to use the 'f2' variant.
> 
> import StringIO, sys
> 
> def f1(msg, out=sys.stdout):
>     out.write("%s\n" % msg)
> 
> def f2(msg, out=None):
>     if not out: 
>         out = sys.stdout
>     out.write("%s\n" % msg)

either of these as

def f3(msg, out=None):
    print >>out, msg

Cheers,
mwh

-- 
  For their next act, they'll no doubt be buying a firewall 
  running under NT, which makes about as much sense as 
  building a prison out of meringue.                     -- -:Tanuki:-
               -- http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Quotes.html