Python Adventures

Problem

I wanted to download an html file with Python, store it in a temporary file, then convert this file to PDF by calling an external program.

Solution #1

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os
import tempfile

temp = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(prefix='report_', suffix='.html', dir='/tmp', delete=False)

html_file = temp.name
(dirName, fileName) = os.path.split(html_file)
fileBaseName = os.path.splitext(fileName)[0]
pdf_file = dirName + '/' + fileBaseName + '.pdf'

print html_file   # /tmp/report_kWKEp5.html
print pdf_file    # /tmp/report_kWKEp5.pdf
# calling of HTML to PDF converter is omitted

See the documentation of tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile here.

Solution #2 (update 20110303)

I had a problem with the previous solution. It works well in command-line, but when I tried to call that script in crontab, it stopped at the line “tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile”. No exception, nothing… So I had to use a different approach:

from time import time

temp = "report.%.7f.html" % time()
print temp    # report.1299188541.3830960.html

The function time() returns the time as a floating point number. It may not be suitable in a multithreaded environment, but it was not the case for me. This version works fine when called from crontab.

Learn more

• tempfile – Create temporary filesystem resources (post by Doug Hellmann with lots of examples)
• Python doc on tempfile

Update (20150712): if you need a temp. file name in the current directory:

>>> import tempfile
>>> tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(dir='.').name
'/home/jabba/tmpKrBzoY'

Update (20150910): if you need a temp. directory:

import tempfile
import shutil

dirpath = tempfile.mkdtemp()    # the temp dir. is created
# ... do stuff with dirpath
shutil.rmtree(dirpath)

This tip is from here.