shove does not store data as expected

[Chris Rebert]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 2:51 AM, Alex <metallourlante at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to use the shove module (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/shove)
> for a simple script. The script read a CSV file ad store the data.
> When I check the content of the "store" object (instance of Shove)
> *before* I close it, the data are all there but when I close and re-
> open it some data are lost. How it is possible? There is something
> wrong in my code or I didn't understand how shove works?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Here is a sample of my code:
>
> DBNAME = "file://store.db"
>
>    csv_file ="test.csv"
>    cities = csv.reader(open(csv_file), delimiter=";")
>    store = Shove(DBNAME, compress=True)
>    for city,region,code in cities:
>        entry_list = store.setdefault(region, [])
>        data = 'just a sample'
>        entry = {city:data}
>        entry_list.append(entry)

If `shove` is like the std lib `shelve` module, the following might
fix the problem:

#untested
for city,region,code in cities:
    entry_list = store.get(region, [])
    data = 'just a sample'
    entry = {city:data}
    entry_list.append(entry)
    store[region] = entry_list

Explanation:
The explicit assignment back to the `store` pseudo-dictionary lets it
properly update its internal state to reflect the change to the value
(in this case, the list) associated with the region key. In your
original version, you merely modified the list in-place, and (due to
the way Python works) `store` has no way of knowing that you've done
that and thus doesn't do the necessary bookkeeping, hence the behavior
you're observing.

See also: http://docs.python.org/library/shelve.html#example

And further note that shove seems to be beta and (apart from
docstrings in the source code) undocumented.

Cheers,
Chris
--
http://blog.rebertia.com