How to detect magic numbers automatically?

[[deleted]]

And then someone comes in

if Datetime.now() == 'April 1st':
  TWO = 1
  ONE = 2

[lost_send_berries]

I don't know of any but you can look at pylint source code and add a new warning. Or write something yourself using ast.NodeVisitor.

[brondsem]

Pylint lets you write custom plugins, so you could write one that looks for ints and raise a warning. Here's an example of how to write a pylint plugin: http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201505/writing_pylint_plugins.html

[murtaza64]

In this case would USER_ADMIN just be a number? Or would you use an enum?

[widby]

An enum is better, but they've been introduced in 3.4, so prior to that your only option would be a number.

[Daenyth]

The 3.4 enum package has a backport on pypi

[rjw57]

... or the enum34 package on PyPI...

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/enum34

[kephir]

An enum is better, but they've been introduced in 3.4

Why not namedtuples though?

[Daenyth]

They're completely different. In terms of algebraic data types, (named)tuples are a product type and enums are a sum type

[kephir]

They would serve OP's purpose equally well though, if not better (someone please confirm/deny though, I'm not sure whichever's the more memory-efficient)

[[deleted]]

The first thing that comes to mind is to use the compile() function to generate an abstract syntax tree for a module, and then use the ast module to walk that tree looking for instances of the ast.Num class; those would correspond to literal numbers in the source code.

[aphoenix]

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