Tab-completion and history in the Python interpreter

I usually use IPython as my interactive Python interpreter, but it has problems with Unicode decoding which can have detrimental effects for times when I need to deal with Unicode (such as when I'm working with FriendFeed PyAPI). When complaining about this on #python, one of the user told me I should use the standard Python interpreter anyway. When I told him I did not use the standard interpreter because I loved the convenience of tab-completion in the IPython shell, he informed me that, indeed, the standard interactive interpreter can do auto-complete.

After some Googling, I came upon this blog post. I wound up using a modified solution posted in the comments. Here's my .pythonrc file:

import atexit
import os.path

try:
   import readline
except ImportError:
   pass
else:
   import rlcompleter

   class IrlCompleter(rlcompleter.Completer):
       """
       This class enables a "tab" insertion if there's no text for
       completion.

       The default "tab" is four spaces. You can initialize with '\t' as
       the tab if you wish to use a genuine tab.

       """

       def __init__(self, tab='    '):
           self.tab = tab
           rlcompleter.Completer.__init__(self)


       def complete(self, text, state):
           if text == '':
               readline.insert_text(self.tab)
               return None
           else:
               return rlcompleter.Completer.complete(self,text,state)


   #you could change this line to bind another key instead tab.
   readline.parse_and_bind('tab: complete')
   readline.set_completer(IrlCompleter().complete)


# Restore our command-line history, and save it when Python exits.
history_path = os.path.expanduser('~/.pyhistory')
if os.path.isfile(history_path):
   readline.read_history_file(history_path)
atexit.register(lambda x=history_path: readline.write_history_file(x))

I then added the following line to my .bashrc:

export PYTHONSTARTUP="$HOME/.pythonrc"

Now I can remain a happy camper using the native interactive interpreter.

Update (2008-1-25): Thanks to Bob Erb's comments, I corrected some poor indentation (whoops!) and also added the final lines to remove the atexit and os.path modules from the main namespace.

Update (2009-4-18): I removed the deletion of atexit and os.path from the main namespace. That seemed to wreck any script that needed either of those; quite a few scripts rely on os.path, in particular.