Jim Gallacher wrote:
How about this? (Excuse the LateX)\class{Field} instances have the following attributes: ... \begin{memberdesc}{file} This is a file-like object. For file uploads it points to a \class{TemporaryFile} instance. (For more information see TemporaryFile in the standard python \citetitle[http://docs.python.org/lib/module-tempfile.html]{tempfile} module). For simple values, it is a \class{StringIO} object, so you can read simple string values via this attribute instead of using the \member{value} attribute as well. \end{memberdesc}
Looks good. Reading this probably answers your question after next.
I guess where I'm getting hung-up is in trying to understand why this is important. Why do you need to know if it's a file object or a file-like object?
It's important to know how to handle information coming in from a POST, because generically I may not know whether a field named "the_file" is intended as a string file name (from type="text") or a file (from type="file"). I don't know what the semantics of the form being submitted are, but I need to do something different with strings and files.
First you're talking about file vs. file-like object, and then file vs string. When you say string do you mean StringIO or StringField. If it's just a case of StringField vs any of the file-like objects, why not just use hasattr(field_thing, 'read')?
Because if the Field is a string value, the file attribute is a StringIO (or cStringIO), which has a read attribute. hasattr(field_thing, 'read') should *always* return True no matter what the Field stores (see documentation above).
I don't know what it is about this issue, but every time I look at it I feel like my IQ has dropped a couple of points. Since this is a limited resource already I don't want to lose any more of it.
Fair enough. I can check to see if file is a StringIO, or a cStringIO, but that's assuming that some Python implemention doesn't decide to return one of those from a tempfile.TemporaryFile call. It's probably not important enough for most people anyway since they're using publisher or something similar.
Sorry to have wasted time on this. Nick
