Question

O.K., I’m coming from Perl to Python and I don’t have much experience in Python so this may seem rather obvious to everyone who’s more experienced with Python.

Anyway, I’m simply loading a configuration file and then, as a self-test, printing the values that are loaded. The code is below:

#!/home/y/bin/python2.7
import logging
import sys
import datetime
import yaml

def main(self):
    #initialize the logger
    logger = logging.getLogger(self.granularity)
    log_fh = logging.FileHandler(filename='/home/logs/pipelineTest/pipelineTest' + datetime.datetime.now().strftime('%Y%m%d_%H%M')  + '.log', mode='w')
    logger.addHandler(log_fh)
    logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)
    formatter = logging.Formatter('%(asctime)-6s: %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s')
    log_fh.setFormatter(formatter)

    #read configuration file
    if sys.argv[1]:
        ymlFH = open(sys.argv[1])
    else:
        ymFH = open('/home/conf/pipelineTest/runPipeline.yml')

    confDict = yaml.load(ymlFH)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    #self-test code
    for key, value in confDict.iteritems():
      print 'Key is: ' + key + '\n'
      print 'value is: ' + confDict[key] + '\n'

The error I’m encountering is:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./runPipeline.py", line 30, in <module>
    for key, value in confDict.iteritems():
NameError: name 'confDict' is not defined

Which I’m interpreting as the name “confDict” has gone out of scope. I don’t understand why it’s gone out of scope.

Answer 1

Your main() function has it’s own scope – not only that, but you are never calling it.

I would suggest you return confDict from your function, and then do confDict = main() in your running block – or, if you are not going to use your main() function in more than one place, just put it straight down, don’t bother with the function.