drive a desktop app from python?

[James Stroud]

Tim Arnold wrote:
> Hi, I don't even know what to google for on this one. I need to drive a 
> commercial desktop app (on windows xp) since the app doesn't have a batch 
> interface.  It's intended to analyze one file at a time and display a 
> report.
> 
> I can get the thing to write out the report an html browser, but I have 
> thousands of files I need it to analyze every night.
> 
> Is there any lib or recipe(s) for doing something like this via python?

You are a little thin on details here. My only advice at this point is 
to check out os.system, which is the simplest option. From there you can 
move to the popen2 module for greater control, but if you are talking 
about a gui app, you may run into hang-ups.

A quick recipe would be the following pretend application that 
recursively descends from the current directory calling the utility 
named "dosapp" on every file it finds that ends with "jpg" (what 
"dosapp" does is left to your imagination):



import os

def doit(suffix, adir, filenames):
   for afile in filenames:
     if afile.endswith(suffix):
       pathname = os.path.join(adir, afile)
       os.system('dosapp %s' % pathname)


top = '.'
suffix = '.jpg'

os.path.walk(top, doit, suffix)


Read the docs on os.path.walk, of course.

James


-- 
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.jamesstroud.com