Question

When I pass the options in the program (a computational biology experiment) I usually pass them through a .py file.
So I have this .py file that reads like:

starting_length=9 starting_cell_size=1000 LengthofExperiments=5000000 

Then I execute the file and get the data. Since the program is all on my machine and no one else has access to it, it is secure in a trivial way.
I can also write a similar file very easily:

def writeoptions(directory):     options=''     options+='starting_length=%s%s'%(starting_length,os.linesep)     options+='starting_cell_size=%s%s'%(starting_cell_size,os.linesep)     options+='LengthofExperiments=%s%s'%(LengthofExperiments,os.linesep) ...     open('%s%soptions.py'%(directory,os.sep),'w').write(options) 

I want to pass a function as one of the parameters:

starting_length=9 starting_cell_size=1000 LengthofExperiments=5000000  def pippo(a,b):     return a+b functionoperator=pippo 

And of course in the real experiment the function pippo will be much more complex. And different from experiment to experiment.

But what I am unable to do is to write the function automatically. In short I don’t know how to generalise the writeoptions function to keep on writing the options, if one of the options is a function. I could of course copy the original file, but this is inelegant, inefficient (because it contains a lot of extra options that are not being used), and generally does not solve the question.

How do you get python to write down the code of a function, as it writes down the value of a variable?

Answer 1

 vinko@mithril$ more a.py  def foo(a):   print a  vinko@mithril$ more b.py  import a import inspect  a.foo(89) print inspect.getsource(a.foo)  vinko@mithril$ python b.py 89 def foo(a):   print a