cStringIO write

[Alex Martelli]

Robin Becker wrote:

> Is it deliberate that 2.2 cStringIO only has a write method when created
> uninitialised? StringIO doesn't have this 'feature', but no mention is
> made of this in the docs.

Very deliberate, I'd say -- they're different types:

[alex at lancelot cb]$ python
Python 2.2 (#1, Dec 23 2001, 20:09:01)
[GCC 2.96 20000731 (Mandrake Linux 8.1 2.96-0.62mdk)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import cStringIO
>>> readonly = cStringIO.StringIO('ciao')
>>> writeonly = cStringIO.StringIO()
>>> type(readonly)
<type 'cStringIO.StringI'>
>>> type(writeonly)
<type 'cStringIO.StringO'>
>>> print type(writeonly).__doc__
Simple type for output to strings.
>>> print type(readonly).__doc__
Simple type for treating strings as input file streams
>>>


And this is indeed covered in the docs:
"""
The following data objects are provided as well:

InputType
The type object of the objects created by calling
  StringIO with a string parameter.
OutputType
The type object of the objects returned by calling
  StringIO with no parameters.
"""

Maybe you could post to sf, either a tiny patch to the docs clarifying this 
(I think a "(read-only)" or something like that in the brief description of 
InputType might be enough?), or a vastly richer and more complex patch if
you think this isn't a documentation problem but rather than these types
should be merged into a single, more complicated one.


Alex