I just ran into a tiny little problem and thought I’d share the solution.

I was writing some tests in which I was mocking a dependency using Mock. My test code was roughly equivalent to the following (based on an example in the Mock documentation on magic methods):

>>> sub1 …

The other day, I tried to return a generator expression from within a with statement in Python, like so:

#!/usr/bin/python

def readlines(fn):
    with open(fn) as fd: # <-- the with statement
        return (line for line in fd) # <-- the generator expression

if __name__ == "__main__":
    for line in readlines("/proc …

Here’s a small Python script/module I put together to list all network interfaces on the current server (tested on Linux only!) in a format that easily lets me convert between name, index and address of an interface.

The code is based on getifaddrs.py from pydlnadms, but I …

Let’s say that I want to mock reading from a file using file’s iterator capability, i.e. (simplified version):

def readfile(f):
    using open(f) as fd:
        for line in fd:
            yield line

I could mock the readfile function, but then my mock would have to replicate the …

I have a function that reads from a file using file’s iterator capability, i.e. (simplified version, in reality there’s going on more within the generator):

def readfile(f):
    using open(f) as fd:
        for line in fd:
            yield line

If the file contains something like a\nb …

The other day, I had a piece of Python code that deserialized an XML text containing a UPnP service description to an ElementTree instance using ElementTree.parse, then at a later stage serialized it back to XML using ElementTree.write.

Now, the service description happened to contain non-qualified attributes (like …

In my airpnp project, I had to write a binary plist parser in order to parse certain data posted by iDevices. To support my unit tests, I created a number of binary plist files using an existing tool. I ended up with 17 files, and quickly realized that I wanted …

In one of my pet projects I use Twisted for handling asynchronous network events. While browsing the Twisted source code, I encountered Zope interfaces. In a dynamically typed language like Python, what good are interfaces?

It turns out that Zope interfaces are slightly different from interfaces found in a statically …