anydbm
and dumbdbm
anydbm
is a generic interface to variants of the DBM
database-DBM, GDBM, or dbhash. If none of these modules is
installed, the slow-but-simple implementation in module dumbdbm
will be used. Both modules provide the same interface:
'r'
to open an existing database for reading only,
'w'
to open an existing database for reading and writing,
'c'
to create the database if it doesn't exist, or
'n'
, which will always create a new empty database. If not
specified, the default value is 'r'
.
The optional mode argument is the Unix mode of the file, used
only when the database has to be created. It defaults to octal
0666
(and will be modified by the prevailing umask).
The object returned by open()
supports most of the same
functionality as dictionaries; keys and their corresponding values can
be stored, retrieved, and deleted, and the has_key()
and
keys()
methods are available. Keys and values must always be
strings.
Both modules also export the exception error
, which is raised
for various problems. The anydbm.error
exception is simply a
different name for the error
exception of the underlying
implementation module used.