Question

I have a string of text that I would like to create a .txt file out of. I would not like to allow it to be accessible to the user (for security reasons), so I would like to store the .txt file in memory (if this is even possible).

For example:
The string is:

'''
Username: Bob
Password: Coolness

'''

I would like to save this string as a .txt file into memory. Then send it to another program.

anotherprogram.exe mytxt.txt

I looked around, and I am wondering if doing this is possible with StringIO? It says ” Read and write strings as files”.. I am not sure, Please respond if you know how to do this in anyway.

Answer 1

If the other program can read from standard input, then subprocess might be the way to go. Here’s a stupid example where anotherprogram.exe is cat.

s='''
Username: Bob
Password: Coolness

'''

from subprocess import Popen,PIPE
p = Popen(['cat','-'], stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE)
stdoutdata, _ = p.communicate(s)

Many utilities that accept input from a file can read from stdin by passing - as the filename, but not all. Whether this works will depend heavily on what anotherprogram.exe actually is.