invoking pylint programmatically

Question

I\'d like to invoke the pylint checker, limited to the Error signalling part, as part of my unit testing. so I checked the pylint executable script, got to the pylint

Answer 1

I got the same problem recently. syt is right, pylint.epylint got several methods in there. However they all call a subprocess in which python is launched again. In my case, this was getting quite slow.

Building from mcarans answer, and finding that there is a flag exit, I did the following

class WritableObject(object):
    "dummy output stream for pylint"
    def __init__(self):
        self.content = []
    def write(self, st):
        "dummy write"
        self.content.append(st)
    def read(self):
        "dummy read"
        return self.content
def run_pylint(filename):
    "run pylint on the given file"
    from pylint import lint
    from pylint.reporters.text import TextReporter
    ARGS = ["-r","n", "--rcfile=rcpylint"]  # put your own here
    pylint_output = WritableObject()
    lint.Run([filename]+ARGS, reporter=TextReporter(pylint_output), exit=False)
    for l in pylint_output.read():
        do what ever you want with l...

which is about 3 times faster in my case. With this I have been going through a whole project, using full output to check each source file, point errors, and rank all files from their note.