Friday, February 15, 2008

bug in IDLE?

i play around with Python. i 've never done anything serious in it, but it's a very handy tool. it's saved my butt a couple of times at work, or at least saved me some nightmarish coding in C, C++, C# or Java. on most major platforms on which it runs, Python comes with IDLE, which comes with an interactive shell for quickly trying out Python scripts, as well as a 'real' editor for creating scripts.

i've used Python for about 2 projects since starting work - similar things, really...and i've noticed that when i'm writing output to a file and run the script using IDLE, more often than not, the file never gets written to the end. in the latest examples, i created a Python script to create SQL INSERT statements to quickly populate a database to test another application (i probably should actually populate the database directly from the script, but that will be a 'long thing'. besides, i already saved myself a little trouble entering the data myself ;)). anyway, the script includes a option to ask how many rows of data to create. i was expecting to see 200 lines of INSERT statements, but it stopped on the 182nd line. this isn't the first time. i ran it again and something similar happened. i had to open a console window and run the script to get all 200 lines written. i'm not sure if it's a Windows-only bug, but i'm going to report it as soon as i can

Update: i posted the problem in Freenode's #Python, and i was told that i should flush() the file. when i tried it, it worked!

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