Main Page   Modules   Data Structures   File List   Data Fields   Globals   Related Pages  

header Class Reference

A python header object represents an RPM package header. More...


Detailed Description

A python header object represents an RPM package header.

All RPM packages have headers that provide metadata for the package. Header objects can be returned by database queries or loaded from a binary package on disk.

The headerFromPackage function loads the package header from a package on disk. It returns a tuple of a "isSource" flag and the header object. The "isSource" flag is set to 1 if the package header was read from a source rpm or to 0 if the package header was read from a binary rpm.

For example:

        import os, rpm
  
        fd = os.open("/tmp/foo-1.0-1.i386.rpm", os.O_RDONLY)
        (header, isSource) = rpm.headerFromPackage(fd)
        fd.close()
The Python interface to the header data is quite elegant. It presents the data in a dictionary form. We'll take the header we just loaded and access the data within it:
        print header[rpm.RPMTAG_NAME]
        print header[rpm.RPMTAG_VERSION]
        print header[rpm.RPMTAG_RELEASE]
in the case of our "foor-1.0-1.i386.rpm" package, this code would output:
        foo
        1.0
        1
You make also access the header data by string name:
        print header['name']
This method of access is a bit slower because the name must be translated into the tag number dynamically.


The documentation for this class was generated from the following file:
Generated at Mon Sep 24 10:37:59 2001 for rpm by doxygen1.2.8.1 written by Dimitri van Heesch, © 1997-2001