Stephan Richter wrote:

Hi everyone,

I am starting to use Restricted Python a lot and I found the following problem with slicing:

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from zope.security import checker l = [1, 2] l[-3:] [1, 2] lp = checker.ProxyFactory(l) lp[-3:] [2]

The problem is that -3 gets converted to 1 somewhere, but it should be a negative number signalizing the slice to start at the beginning of the sequence.

The problem exists both in Python 2.4 and 2.5 and affects both Zope 2 and 3, since both Zopes use the RestrictedPython package.

I suspect that the problem lies with the new slicing syntax introduced in Python 2.4. I am willing to fix the bug, but I would need some guidance and goodwill from the gods of RestrictedPython. Anyone?

Are you in fact using RestrictedPython? The code snippet looks like it only uses a security proxy. RestrictedPython is a custom Python compiler; you're not using it unless your interactive Python prompt uses RestrictedPython to compile all expressions. The behavior you saw is exactly what happens when an object implements __getitem__ and __len__ but not __getslice__. If lp matches that description, and the length of lp is 2, then Python evaluates "lp[-3:]" as "lp.__getitem__(slice(-1, 2147483647, None))". I wish Python would instead evaluate it as "lp.__getitem__(slice(-3))", but maybe there are historical reasons for this. OTOH, if RestrictedPython really is involved, RP will convert the expression to "_getitem_(lp, slice(-3, None))", which would probably do what you wanted, assuming the _getitem_ function is not too clever. BTW, here's the code I used to answer this email. :-)

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class itemgetter: ... def __getitem__(self, i): ... return i ... def __len__(self): ... return 2 ... itemgetter()[-3:] slice(-1, 2147483647, None)

Shane