Yet another attempt at a safe eval() call

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 5 January 2013 16:01, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 2:56 AM, Oscar Benjamin
> <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 4 January 2013 15:53, Grant Edwards <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>> On 2013-01-04, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 03 Jan 2013 23:25:51 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
>>>>
>>>> * But frankly, you should avoid eval, and write your own mini-integer
>>>>   arithmetic evaluator which avoids even the most remote possibility
>>>>   of exploit.
>>>
>>> That's obviously the "right" thing to do.  I suppose I should figure
>>> out how to use the ast module.
>>
>> Someone has already created a module that does this called numexpr. Is
>> there some reason why you don't want to use that?
>>
>>>>> import numexpr
>>>>> numexpr.evaluate('2+4*5')
>> array(22, dtype=int32)
>>>>> numexpr.evaluate('2+a*5', {'a':4})
>> array(22L)
>
> Is that from PyPI? It's not in my Python 3.3 installation. Obvious
> reason not to use it: Unaware of it. :)

My apologies. I should have at least provided a link:
http://code.google.com/p/numexpr/

I installed it from the ubuntu repo under the name python-numexpr. It
is also on PyPI:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/numexpr

numexpr is a well established project intended primarily for memory
and cache efficient computations over large arrays of data. Possibly
as a side effect, it can also be used to evaluate simple algebraic
expressions involving ordinary scalar variables.


Oscar