What is an alternative to execfile in Python 3?

Question

It seems they canceled in Python 3 all the easy way to quickly load a script by removing execfile()

Is there an obvious alternative I'm missing?

Answer 1

According to the documentation, instead of

execfile("./filename")  

Use

exec(open("./filename").read()) 

See:

• What’s New In Python 3.0

Answer 2

You are just supposed to read the file and exec the code yourself. 2to3 current replaces

execfile("somefile.py", global_vars, local_vars) 

as

with open("somefile.py") as f:     code = compile(f.read(), "somefile.py", 'exec')     exec(code, global_vars, local_vars) 

(The compile call isn't strictly needed, but it associates the filename with the code object making debugging a little easier.)

See:

• http://docs.python.org/release/2.7.3/library/functions.html#execfile
• http://docs.python.org/release/3.2.3/library/functions.html#compile
• http://docs.python.org/release/3.2.3/library/functions.html#exec