os.tmpfile()

[jyoung79 at kc.rr.com]

> It's a file.  You read strings from it and write strings to it.  It 
> isn't a string itself.  Given that what you're trying to do doesn't make 
> any sense, it's hard to know where to begin to identify what's confusing 
> you.

> -- 
> Erik Max Francis

Erik, I am going to be displaying sections of text in the Terminal Window on OS X.  
I wanted to format the text in a specific way and thought it might be quicker to 
output all the text to a temporary file that I could quickly read sections from instead 
of storing in memory.  Not sure if this is the most efficient way to do this or not but 
thought at least it'd be a good way to learn something new in Python.  I was 
assuming tmpfile() would automatically create some sort of temporary file that 
would automatically delete itself when the code was finished.

--

> Try this:

> >>> import os
> >>> c = os.tmpfile()
> >>> c.write('dude')
> >>> c.seek(0)
> >>> c.read()
> 'dude'

redawgts, thank you very much for the example!  I appreciate you showing 
me how this works!

--

> Please don't use os.tmpfile(). It's not safe and exists only for legacy
> reasons. The tempfile module contains methods to create safe temporary
> files and directories.

> Christian

Thanks Christian for this info!  I'll look into using the tempfile module instead.

Thank you all for sharing your knowledge of Python...  this is extremely helpful 
to me!

Jay