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The fact that tempfile.TemporaryFile() has a "name" integer attribute causes weird behavior when interacting with libraries that rely on this attribute being a valid string for file objects.
For instance, it led to this exception with the "tarfile" module, which I resolved by using a NamedTemporaryFile():
>>> tarfile.open(fileobj=tempfile.TemporaryFile(), mode='w')
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
 File "/usr/lib/python3.4/tarfile.py", line 1585, in open
 return cls.taropen(name, mode, fileobj, **kwargs)
 File "/usr/lib/python3.4/tarfile.py", line 1595, in taropen
 return cls(name, mode, fileobj, **kwargs)
 File "/usr/lib/python3.4/tarfile.py", line 1431, in __init__
 self.name = os.path.abspath(name) if name else None
 File "/usr/lib/python3.4/posixpath.py", line 360, in abspath
 if not isabs(path):
 File "/usr/lib/python3.4/posixpath.py", line 64, in isabs
 return s.startswith(sep)
AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute 'startswith'
Which is caused by these lines in the "tarfile" module:
if name is None and hasattr(fileobj, "name"):
 name = fileobj.name
If TemporaryFile() didn't have a name attribute, tarfile, which doesn't really need the file name, would simply have continued without errors.
I am not aware of any place where this "name" integer attribute is actually useful, and, as a matter of fact, it is not even documented: http://docs.python.org/3.4/library/tempfile.html#tempfile.TemporaryFile