A couple of Python 'Features'

[Paul McGuire]

"Michael Foord" <fuzzyman at gmail.com> wrote in message
news:6f402501.0409040202.26cd7a30 at posting.google.com...
> I've come across a couple of 'features' in Python standard libraries -
> and I'm not sure if they're meant to be there... or if they're bugs...
>
> One in urllib2 and one in cgi.
>
> >>> from urllib2 import urlopen
> >>> a = urlopen('http://www.voidspace.org.uk')
> >>> i = a.info()
> >>> for entry in i: print entry
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<pyshell#11>", line 1, in -toplevel-
>     for entry in i: print entry
>   File "D:\PYTHON23\lib\rfc822.py", line 390, in __getitem__
>     return self.dict[name.lower()]
> AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute 'lower'
>
> and in cgi (a result that happens in live CGI as well as interactive
> sessions....) :
>
> >>> import cgi
> >>> a = cgi.FieldStorage()
> >>> for entry in a: print entry
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<pyshell#3>", line 1, in ?
>     for entry in a: print entry
>   File "C:\PYTHON22\lib\cgi.py", line 550, in __getitem_
>     raise KeyError,
>  keyKeyError: 0
> >>>
>
> You can get round the cgi bug because :
> for entry in a.keys(): print entry
> works fine - but it's a bit annoying.
>
> (Admittedly my server has python 2.2, but the urllib2 bug occurs in
> Python 2.3.4 as well I think).
>
> Regards,
>
>
> Fuzzy
>
> http://www.voidspace.org.uk/atlantibots/pythonutils.html

The urllib2 problem looks like a clone of one mentioned earlier in the email
module, which I looked into and reported as bug 1017329.  You could add your
example to that, or open a new bug report.  But the two should be linked
somehow, as they have the same failure mode, and very likely the same
resolution.

Looking briefly at the cgi module also shows a similar implementation gap,
but I see that FieldStorage implements __iter__, which I thought would be
used in "for entry in a" type iteration, and that failing the existence of
__iter__, then __len__ would be tried with successive calls to __getitem__
from 0 to len-1.  What *is* the order of resolution for iterating over a
sequence?

(1015249 was also recently submitted, to address problems with
FieldStorage's __len__ function, should also be linked.)

-- Paul