How do I create a file-like object (same duck type as File) with the contents of a string?
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4 Answers
For Python 2.x, use the StringIO module. For example:
>>> from cStringIO import StringIO
>>> f = StringIO('foo')
>>> f.read()
'foo'
I use cStringIO (which is faster), but note that it doesn't accept Unicode strings that cannot be encoded as plain ASCII strings. (You can switch to StringIO by changing "from cStringIO" to "from StringIO".)
For Python 3.x, use the io module.
f = io.StringIO('foo')
3 Comments
Armin Ronacher
There is a reason now to use cStringIO: cStringIO doesn't support unicode strings.
John Fouhy
I think a better idea is to do 'import cStringIO as StringIO'. That way if you need to switch to the pure python implementation for any reason, you only need to change one line..
guettli
This works for Python2.7, too:
io.StringIO(u'foo') I would use thisIn Python 3.0:
import io
with io.StringIO() as f:
f.write('abcdef')
print('gh', file=f)
f.seek(0)
print(f.read())
The output is:
'abcdefgh'
Comments
If your file-like object is expected to contain bytes, the string should first be encoded as bytes, and then a BytesIO object can be used instead. In Python 3:
from io import BytesIO
string_repr_of_file = 'header\n byline\n body\n body\n end'
function_that_expects_bytes(BytesIO(bytes(string_repr_of_file,encoding='utf-8')))
Comments
This works for Python2.7 and Python3.x:
io.StringIO(u'foo')