What is a block?

[tbekolay]

Question

Apologies if this has been asked before, but I'm curious what pylint considers a "block" and whether that could be documented more explicitly. Right now, the docs state:

add "#pylint: disable=some-message,another-one" at the desired block level or at the end of the desired line of code

I ask this because I was surprised to see that the following does not work:

        if hasattr(SafeConfigParser, "read_file"):
            return SafeConfigParser.read_file(self, fp, filename)
        else:
            # pylint: disable=deprecated-method
            return SafeConfigParser.readfp(self, fp, filename)

The deprecated-method warning is still raised.

However, the following does work:

        try:
            return SafeConfigParser.read_file(self, fp, filename)
        except AttributeError:
            # pylint: disable=deprecated-method
            return SafeConfigParser.readfp(self, fp, filename)

The deprecated-method warning is disabled, as desired. In the if/else case, I had to add the # pylint: disable= line to block that contains the if/else instead.

[PCManticore]

Hey, thanks for creating an issue!
I think there are two problems to be solved here:

• we need to do a better job at documenting what a block is. In short, a block is either a scope (say a function) or a multiline statement (TryFinally, if statements, for loops).

• the second problem is that we should be able to disable that message in your example, so there is a bug related to that check

[Pierre-Sassoulas]

The bug is a duplicate of #872, the documentation need to be done though.

        if hasattr(SafeConfigParser, "read_file"):
            return SafeConfigParser.read_file(self, fp, filename)
        else:  # pylint: disable=deprecated-method
            return SafeConfigParser.readfp(self, fp, filename)

Would work here.