I would really love to add a few params to input so that it's signature looked more like so:

def input(prompt, /, *, fin=sys.stdin, fout=sys.stdout, ferr=sys.stderr):
    ...

This would certainly make overriding the the files in specific calls to input easier. A reasonable use case is collecting a piece over /dev/tty explicitly so that a redirected stdin could be used to pipe data into a program while overriding using /dev/tty to collect some piece of data. Here's some code illustrating what I'd like:

import sys
sys.stdin.close()
sys.stdin = open('/dev/null', 'r')
with open('/dev/tty', 'r') as f:
    x = input('Name? ', fin=f)
print(x)

FWIW, I have actually already implemented this fully (including tests). I am just trying to see what I need to do to allow release since I am work on my employer's time.

In the interest of getting feedback, does the signature provided above look sane?

This might also allow simplification of the getpass.unix_getpass() logic. I am not 100% sure about that yet though.

This is probably a topic for the python-ideas mailing list.  For example, rather than complicating input, it might be better to propose adding a redirect_stdin to contextlib to parallel the two existing redirect context managers.  I don't remember why that was not added when the others were, but there was probably a reason, so a discussion about what the best solution is for the use case is in order, and python-ideas is the place for that.

input() is a convenient function for simple user interaction. If you need to read a data from different file object just use its readline() method.

Added a PR to facilitate discussion on python-ideas.

For reference, here's the link to the Python ideas thread:

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2017-September/047230.html

The discussion on python-ideas has some unresolved questions. Wren, did you get a definitive answer on this idea?

See also Issue1927.

I'm not sure that I ever got a definitive issue, but I didn't have time to
push it forward. I still think the idea has merit. I'd love to see it
implemented, but I don't have the time to pursue it right now.

Thanks,
wt

On Mon, Jan 17, 2022 at 10:23 AM Irit Katriel <report@bugs.python.org>
wrote:

>
> Irit Katriel <iritkatriel@gmail.com> added the comment:
>
> See also Issue1927.
>
> ----------
> nosy: +iritkatriel
>
> _______________________________________
> Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org>
> <https://bugs.python.org/issue31603>
> _______________________________________
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