Making tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile a class

[anntzer]

BPO	22387
Nosy	@birkenfeld, @ncoghlan, @ericvsmith, @serhiy-storchaka, @anntzer

^{Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.}

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GitHub fields:

assignee = None
closed_at = None
created_at = <Date 2014-09-11.08:15:45.285>
labels = ['type-feature', 'library']
title = 'Making tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile a class'
updated_at = <Date 2014-09-11.15:49:10.704>
user = 'https://github.com/anntzer'

bugs.python.org fields:

activity = <Date 2014-09-11.15:49:10.704>
actor = 'Antony.Lee'
assignee = 'none'
closed = False
closed_date = None
closer = None
components = ['Library (Lib)']
creation = <Date 2014-09-11.08:15:45.285>
creator = 'Antony.Lee'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 22387
keywords = []
message_count = 5.0
messages = ['226752', '226756', '226758', '226766', '226783']
nosy_count = 5.0
nosy_names = ['georg.brandl', 'ncoghlan', 'eric.smith', 'serhiy.storchaka', 'Antony.Lee']
pr_nums = []
priority = 'normal'
resolution = None
stage = None
status = 'open'
superseder = None
type = 'enhancement'
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue22387'
versions = ['Python 3.5']

[anntzer]

Currently, tempfile.TemporaryFile and tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile are functions, not classes, despite what their names suggest, preventing subclassing. It would arguably be not so easy to make TemporaryFile a class, as its return value is whatever "_io.open" returns, which can be of various types, but NamedTemporaryFile can trivially converted into a class by reusing the body of _TemporaryFileWrapper (which is not used elsewhere).

[ericvsmith]

Can you explain why you want to subclass them?

[anntzer]

The initial idea was to solve bpo-14243 (NamedTemporaryFile would be more useful on Windows if you could close it without deleting) by adding a "closed" keyword argument to the constructor of a subclass, that would set "delete" to False and then close it, e.g.

class NTF(NamedTemporaryFile):
    def __init__(self, *args, closed=False, **kwargs):
        if closed: kwargs["delete"] = True
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        if closed: self.close()

Actually, there are some not-so-nice interactions with the context-manager protocol though, as the file cannot be reopened. So it's not clear that this is such a good idea.

Still, it somewhat confusing that a CamelCase object is not actually a type (especially when TemporaryDirectory is one).

[serhiy-storchaka]

You can do this with a function too:

    def NTF(*args, closed=False, **kwargs):
        if closed: kwargs["delete"] = True
        ntf = NamedTemporaryFile(*args, **kwargs)
        if closed: ntf.close()
        return ntf

[anntzer]

Yes, but this will make the context-manager approach (with NamedTemporaryFile(closed=True): <do stuff>) unusable, because the underlying file object will be closed before calling __enter__. I think the only reasonable way to implement this would be to have __enter__ return the file name (as for TemporaryDirectory), instead of the file object (which is reasonable because if I pass closed=True, it probably means all I care is that a file exists here for some other process to use!).
But, with the function approach, I cannot override __enter__.