command line in python with history

Question

I'm writing program in python in which user is to work with program by command-line. I'm using raw_input to get command from user. I want to have "memory" like in bash, etc, so, if you press an arrow (up or down) on your keyboard, you get previous/next command. I know about one way to do it (simply get every char typed by user and check it), but maybe you know something better / cuter :-)

greetings

Answer 1

If I understand what you want, you can achieve it simply by importing the readline module. This will modify the behavior of raw_input() so that it behaves more like the python interactive shell in terms of history and line editing.

Be careful though, it's possible to build python without readline so I'd suggest importing it inside a try block:

try:
    import readline
except:
    pass #readline not available