Compile (but don't run) Python script

Question

Possible duplicate:
How to check Python script syntax without executing it?

How to compile a Python script without running it? I just want to check script errors for syntax errors. I was hoping for a simple command line switch, but didn't see anything in python --help . I would like to answer for both Python 2 and Python 3.

Answer 1

py_compile - Compile Python source files

 import py_compile py_compile.compile('my_script.py') 

Answer 2

 python -m py_compile script.py 

Answer 3

You can use pylint to find syntax errors as well as more subtle errors, such as accessing undefined variables in some rarely used conditional branch.

Answer 4

One way is to do something like this (for test.py ):

 python -c "__import__('compiler').parse(open('test.py').read())" 

This works for Python 2.x.