Python Programming On Win32

The PythonWin Environment

When PythonWin starts, it automatically opens its Interactive Window, where you see the Python copyright message and the standard Python prompt:

>>>

If you are familiar with Python on any other operating system or have used the standard Python.exe included with the Python distribution, you can immediately start entering Python commands to be executed interactively. Chapter 2, and the Python tutorial (optionally installed with the Python distribution), describes using Python interactively, and we discuss some additional PythonWin features later in this chapter.

As much as possible, PythonWin conforms to the standard user-interface features of Windows. Thus, you will notice a Windows toolbar with familiar File → Open and File → New icons, and a fairly standard set of menus at the top of the application. Most of the items on the menus are obvious, so we won’t describe the exact operation of the File → Open and File → New operations. Instead, we will focus on the features specific to PythonWin.

Now would be a good time to create a new Python source file to demonstrate some of the features of PythonWin. To create a new file, select the blank document toolbar item, then select File → New or press Ctrl-N. A dialog box appears that asks which type of document to create. Select Python Script.

A blank source file is created. Type the following code:

def hello(msg): print "Hello, " + msg def main(): import sys print "Script name is", sys.argv[0] if len(sys.argv)>=2: hello(sys.argv[1]) ...