[twill] The wonders of twill's run command

Howard B. Golden howard_b_golden at yahoo.com
Tue Mar 24 16:38:39 PDT 2009


Hi Titus and everyone,

I'm hesitant to admit that I've only started to use twill. I'm blown away!

The one suggestion I have is to add more documentation and examples for the run command, since its capabilities may not be obvious:

For example:
    a. import any module:

        run "import os"
        # now the os module is available in future run commands
        run "home = os.environ['HOME']"
        echo $home
        # outputs: your home directory name

    b. set twill's global and local variables:

        run "import time; lt = time.localtime(); local_date = '%04d-%02d-%02d' % (lt[0], lt[1], lt[2])"
        # $lt is still the Python time structure (not a string!)
        echo $local_date
        # outputs: 2009-03-24 (or the current date in local time)

    c. do something to the html:
        run "b = get_browser(); my_page = b.get_html(); page_length = repr(len(my_page))"
        # $my_page now contains the html for further processing
        echo $page_length
        # outputs: length of current page. (you must use repr to get a string.)

One question: Currently, the echo command has this code to deal with the supplied strings:

        strs = map(str, strs)

This code will only work for strings and string-like objects. If echo used this line instead:

        strs = map(repr, strs)

would it still do what you expect (while also accepting other object types)?

Thank you, Titus and all contributors, for a fantastic package!

Regards,

Howard



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