Add stdin and stdout options

[w0rp]

Currently autoflake reads from a file by taking a filename, and outputs a diff with a patch to make. This works well for some command line usage, but doesn't integrate so well with replacing a buffer in Vim. This could be improved by offering an option to read the file from stdin, and an option for outputting the entire file contents, with the patch applied, to stdout. stdin support could either by via flag, or by reading a special filename -. Supposing there was a flag for stdout support, then autoflake could automatically remove unused imports in Vim with both flags like so.

silent 0,$!autoflake --stdin --output-file

That command would take the contents of the current buffer, pass it to autoflake via stdin, get the new file after applying the patch back out again, and replace the current buffer with that text.

At the moment, I shall have to save my current buffer to a file, run autoflake on that temporary file and save the diff to another temporary file, and then use the :diffpatch command to apply the patch to the current buffer, in order to integrate autoflake with Vim.

[alok]

I'd also be very happy to see this implemented.

[myint]

I think this is a reasonable request. I've done this in various other tools. For example, see:

https://github.com/myint/docformatter/blob/7a23f89a8bcfb117db2f388c6706d28e9bb30e9c/docformatter.py#L593-L626

[alok]

Implemented it. See the PR.

[brupelo]

@myint Steven, hi. What happened finally to this feature? I'd be very happy to use it on a SublimeText plugin but i don't see it living on the latest autoflake 1.2 after doing pip install --upgrade autoflake.

Autoflake is an awesome tool and reading from stdin is supported by many python linters out there, so it'd be great to have it as well here.

For example, autopep8... test it on windows is as easy as just doing echo a=1+2 | autopep8 --ignore=IGNORE -.

Please let me know. Tyvm

[brupelo]

Is this repo still alive? Here's a little example how to achieve the task:

• Make sure this option doesn't conflict with existing one: https://github.com/hhatto/autopep8/blob/master/autopep8.py#L3446-L3457
• Read from standard input: https://github.com/hhatto/autopep8/blob/master/autopep8.py#L3955-L3963

[myint]

@brupelo Please see #37 (comment).

[brupelo]

Almost all python linters out there support this and if - conflicts with another option the right call is just warning about it (see for instance how isort does it as an example), not having this standard common operation on autoflake doesn't make sense. A linter tool should be a tool to be used not only on the command line but also should allow to interact with the IDE itself.

[myint]

I'm not arguing against the - feature. 😄

Merely doing it in the right way, which I specified in the pull request. I would do it myself if I wasn't doing 12 hour days at work.

[Yevgnen]

Any news?

[w0rp]

If there was news, you'd see a comment here. ;)

[fsouza]

@myint hi there! If I were to take on this change, would you accept a patch? I can build on #37 or start from scratch, whatever works better (haven't investigated what will be simpler yet).

[metopa]

@fsouza Hi, why you PR was declined?