Securely generate temporary files and directories with the tempfile module. Read more at pymotw.com: tempfile

From A. M. Kuchling via the python-dev mailing list: After the success of January’s bug day, which closed 37 issues, let’s have another one this month! Here’s the brief announcement: Python Bug Day: Saturday, February 23 2008. Meet in the #python-dev IRC channel on irc.freenode.net and help improve Python. For more information, see http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonBugDay. —amk

What’s new? I finally fixed one of the lingering “issues” I’ve had since migrating from Tiger to Leopard last month. Something in the Automator actions or other behavior changed in my AstronomyPictureOfTheDay app and every morning I have been greeted with 2 Safari windows. One is the usual window showing the description of the image downloaded that night, and the other is the local copy of the image. I don’t need to see the latter, and it seemed a little sloppy so I wanted to fix it.

Although most of the functions it used to contain have moved to methods of string and unicode objects, the string module still contains several useful items. Read more at pymotw.com: string

IPython is a feature-rich interactive shell for Python developers. Virtualenv creates isolated development environments so you can test or install packages without introducing conflicts. This month, Doug examines how both tools can make your life a little easier. Last month, around the time I started working on my January column, I posted to my blog asking readers to tell me about their favorite Python development tools. I received several good tips from a variety of developers.

We’ve had a couple of requests for links to back issues of the magazine from people who want to buy the PDFs. We’re still working on our web site (the actual magazine takes priority), so in the mean time, here’s a list of links: Oct 2007 Nov 2007 Dec 2007 Jan 2008

I have been meaning to post about this for a while, and am just getting around to it. As part of the GHOP contest, Zachary Voase created an add-on for Proctor that loads test failures into Trac as tickets. ProctorTicket is an application, written in Python, which allows you to read a parseable proctor output log, or run a proctor test, and import all generated errors as Trac tickets. Tickets are the equivalent of issues, tasks or bugs in other software project management systems.

The January issue is live and ready for download from http://pymag.phparch.com/c/issue/view/66. This month the cover article from Alex Martelli gives advice about how and when to use regular expressions for parsing text, and when to use other techniques instead. Eugen Wintersberger has an excellent introduction to using ctypes. I’ve been looking forward to reviewing his article for a while now, so I’m glad to finally see it in print. Dan Felts returns with an article about controlling the Nessus security scanner using Python to talk to it over the network.

Registration for PyCon 2008 is now open. I’m signed up and ready to go. I haven’t been for a few years, so I’m pretty excited to be going this year. I guess the first time I went to a Python conference was IPC8 back in 2000. We were snowed into the hotel that weekend by a freak storm in DC, and barely made it out of town before the next icing hit by taking an earlier flight than we had planned on Sunday.

Writing code to work with files on multiple platforms is easy using the functions included in the os.path module. Even programs not intended to be ported between platforms should use os.path to make parsing path names reliable. Read more: os.path