Make a unique filesystem path, without creating the file

[Ben Finney]

Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> writes:

> If you can absolutely guarantee that this string will never actually
> be used on a real filesystem, then go right ahead and use it.

I'm giving advice in examples in documentation. It's not enough to have
some private usage that I know is good, I am looking for a standard API
that when the reader looks it up will not be laden with big scary
warnings.

Currently I can write about the public API ‘tempfile.mktemp’ in
documentation, but the conscientious reader will be correct to have
concerns when the examples I give are sternly deprecated in the standard
library documentation.

Or I can write about the private API ‘tempfile._RandomNameSequence’ in
the documentation, and the conscientious reader will be correct to have
concerns about use of an undocumented private-use API.

I'm looking for a way to give examples that use that standard library
functionality, with an API that is both public and not discouraged.

> > I'm looking for how to get at that functionality in a non-deprecated
> > way, without re-implementing it myself.
>
> You probably can't, not if you want to future-proof your code against
> the day when tempfile.mktemp is removed.

That's disappointing. It is already implemented and well-tested, it is
useful as is. Forking and duplicating it is poor practice if it can
simply be used in a standard place.

I have reported <URL:https://bugs.python.org/issue26362> for this
request.

-- 
 \     “Nothing worth saying is inoffensive to everyone. Nothing worth |
  `\    saying will fail to make you enemies. And nothing worth saying |
_o__)            will not produce a confrontation.” —Johann Hari, 2011 |
Ben Finney