How to launch an EDITOR (e. g. vim) from a python script?

Calling up $EDITOR is easy. I've written this kind of code to call up editor:

import sys, tempfile, osfrom subprocess import callEDITOR = os.environ.get('EDITOR','vim') #that easy!initial_message = "" # if you want to set up the file somehowwith tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(suffix=".tmp") as tf:  tf.write(initial_message)  tf.flush()  call([EDITOR, tf.name])  # do the parsing with `tf` using regular File operations.  # for instance:  tf.seek(0)  edited_message = tf.read()

The good thing here is, the libraries handle creating and removing the temporary file.

In python3: 'str' does not support the buffer interface

$ python3 editor.pyTraceback (most recent call last):  File "editor.py", line 9, in <module>    tf.write(initial_message)  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/tempfile.py", line 399, in func_wrapper    return func(*args, **kwargs)TypeError: 'str' does not support the buffer interface

For python3, use initial_message = b"" to declare the buffered string.

Then use edited_message.decode("utf-8") to decode the buffer into a string.

import sys, tempfile, osfrom subprocess import callEDITOR = os.environ.get('EDITOR','vim') #that easy!initial_message = b"" # if you want to set up the file somehowwith tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(suffix=".tmp") as tf:    tf.write(initial_message)    tf.flush()    call([EDITOR, tf.name])    # do the parsing with `tf` using regular File operations.    # for instance:    tf.seek(0)    edited_message = tf.read()    print (edited_message.decode("utf-8"))

Result:

$ python3 editor.pylook a string

Package python-editor:

$ pip install python-editor$ python>>> import editor>>> result = editor.edit(contents="text to put in editor\n")

More details here: https://github.com/fmoo/python-editor