sys.stdin.readline()

[Alex Martelli]

Mike Maxwell <maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu> wrote:
   ...
> The guy down the hall does these kinds of things with perl one-liners,
> but I have more dignity than to use perl...  Unfortunately, it's looking
> more and more complex to do one-liners like this in Python.  Am I 
> overlooking s.t.?

No, I think you're correctly observing that Python isn't oriented to
one-liners -- not at all.  Most interesting things in Python require
more than one line.  You could write a "oneliners shell" that takes some
defined separator and turns it into a newline, of course, e.g.:

bangoneliner.py:
    #!/usr/bin/env python
    import sys
    oneliner = sys.argv.pop(1)
    exec '\n'.join(oneliner.split('!'))

now, sometying like

bangoneliner.py 'for x in xrange(7):!  if x%2:!    print x'

should work (note that inserting the spaces after the bangs to simulate
proper indentation IS a silly fuss, but you hafta...:-).


Alex