Question

Guyz,am running into following error with the belwo code,where is ti going wrong?
any cleanup suggestions also accepted

    for line in file(timedir + "/change_authors.txt"):
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'file' referenced before assignment

Code below:

    import os,datetime
    import subprocess
    from subprocess import check_call,Popen, PIPE
    from shutil import copyfile,copy

def main ():
    #check_call("ssh -p 29418 review-droid.comp.com change query --commit-message status:open project:platform/vendor/qcom-proprietary/radio branch:master | grep -Po '(?<=(email|umber): )\S+' | xargs -n2")
    global timedir
    change=147441
    timedir=datetime.datetime.now().strftime('%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S')
    #changeauthors = dict((int(x.split('/')[3]), x) for line in file(timedir + "/change_authors.txt"))
    for line in file(timedir + "/change_authors.txt"):
        changeauthors = dict(line.split()[0], line.split()[1]) 
    print changeauthors[change]
    try:
        os.makedirs(timedir)
    except OSError, e:
        if e.errno != 17:
            raise # This was not a "directory exist" error..
    with open(timedir + "/change_authors.txt", "wb") as file:
        check_call("ssh -p 29418 review-droid.comp.com "
            "change query --commit-message "
            "status:open project:platform/vendor/qcom-proprietary/radio branch:master |"
            "grep -Po '(?<=(email|umber): )\S+' |"
            "xargs -n2",
                shell=True,   # need shell due to the pipes
                stdout=file)  # redirect to a file

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Answer 1

You shouldn’t use file() to open a file on your filesystem: use open (at the line causing the error).

---

The documentation recommends against it:

Constructor function for the file type, described further in section File Objects. The constructor’s arguments are the same as those of the open() built-in function described below.

When opening a file, it’s preferable to use open() instead of invoking this constructor directly. file is more suited to type testing (for example, writing isinstance(f, file)).

New in version 2.2.

Also, it’s going away in Python 3.