Question

I’m an old-fashioned Pascal programmer, new to OOP and Python, so please bear with me…I’ve got a book on Python and I’ve searched here first (although lots of similar threads – not checked every one)…

I’m trying to write a program to include existing modules written by others in my company. According to my Python book, I should be able to import whole modules or just specific classes. The book says that when ‘import’ is used, it actually runs the specified code (not like the INHERIT I’m used to in Pascal).

I have this structure in the module, mod.py, I want to use:

from x.y.z import stuff

class c1(superclass):
    def func1(self):
        ....
    def func2(self, db):
        ....
        with self.db as handler:
            ....

and I’ve got a basic script, test.py, that does just this:

from mod import c1

print "Hello"

when I execute ‘python test.py’, I get the error message:

'with self.db as handler' - invalid syntax

I think I’m missing something fundamental here, so any help much appreciated.

Answer 1

You have modified the error message, but I assume it looks like

  File "mod.py", line 8
    with self.db as handler:
         ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

This means that your Python version is too old to know the with statement. Update to an implementation that supports python 2.6+.

In Python 2.5, you can also add a __future__ declaration at the top of mod.py, like this:

from __future__ import with_statement