Bug in email package?

[Tim Roberts]

Roman Suzi <rnd at onego.ru> wrote:
>
>I was playing with email package and discovrered this strange kind of 
>behaviour:
>
>>>> import email.Message
>>>> m = email.Message.Message()
>>>> m['a'] = '123'
>>>> print m
>>From nobody Mon Feb 21 00:12:27 2005
>a: 123
>
>>>> for i in m: print i
>...
>Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
>   File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/email/Message.py", line 304, in __getitem__
>     return self.get(name)
>   File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/email/Message.py", line 370, in get
>     name = name.lower()
>AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute 'lower'

Intuitively, what did you expect this to do?  I don't see why a single
message should be iterable.

>I think that if any object (from standard library at least) doesn't support
>iteration, it should clearly state so.

That's going a bit far.  Iteration is a relatively new addition to Python.
Those classes that DO support iteration generally say so.  If it isn't
mentioned, you probaby shouldn't assume it.

>Can this behaviour of email be considered a bug?

Not in my opinion, no.

>Is there a good case to iterate over something useful in a message?

Well, if you don't have an answer to that question, then why would you
expect it to support iteration?

>P.S. rfc822 has the same behaviour, at least on Python 2.3

Again, I'm not sure what, intuitively, it would mean to iterate over an
rfc822 object.
-- 
- Tim Roberts, timr at probo.com
  Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.