[Grinder-use] Puzzling Failures

[David R. <da...@ru...>]

I've been beating my head against a problem and cannot figure it out.  Ultimately I'm trying to use 
regular expressions to search the text of an HTTP response, but I've whittled the code down to a 
small bit that demonstrates the error I've not been able to get around.  Here's the script:

import re

def x(message):
   print message
   s = "yaddah <!-- something --> foo <!-- blah blah blah --> bar"
   comments = re.findall("<!--.*?-->",s)
   for c in comments:
     print "\tFound \"%s\""%c
   return

if False:
   x("all alone")

class TestRunner:
   def __call__(self):
     x("test runner here")
     return

   def workaround(self):
     x("workaround here")
     return

if False:
   tr = TestRunner()
   tr()

if False:
   tr = TestRunner()
   tr.workaround()

if False:
   x("alone again, naturally")

When I run that script with The Grinder as-is, it fails with "Aborted run due to Jython exception: 
ValueError: ('unsupported operand type', 'any') [calling TestRunner]".

My error log says:

2/26/08 6:14:04 AM (thread 0 run 0): Aborted run due to Jython exception: ValueError: ('unsupported 
operand type', 'any') [calling TestRunner]
ValueError: ('unsupported operand type', 'any')
         File "/opt/jython2.2.1/Lib/sre_compile.py", line 143, in _compile
         File "/opt/jython2.2.1/Lib/sre_compile.py", line 71, in _compile
         File "/opt/jython2.2.1/Lib/sre_compile.py", line 421, in _code
         File "/opt/jython2.2.1/Lib/sre_compile.py", line 437, in compile
         File "/opt/jython2.2.1/Lib/sre.py", line 227, in _compile
         File "/opt/jython2.2.1/Lib/sre.py", line 166, in findall
         File "/home/david/grinder/agent_scripts/http11.py", line 6, in x
         File "/home/david/grinder/agent_scripts/http11.py", line 16, in __call__

Now, if I set ANY of the "if False" lines to "if True", the script runs fine, no errors.
Why does it only work when I add a "fake" call to the x function first?
The regular expression stuff also works fine in a simple Jython script outside of The Grinder.

I'm using The Grinder 3.0.1 and Jython 2.2.1 on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).

David