python win32com, are objects automatically re-used?

Question

The python code iterates over the paragraphs of a simple document (7 lines "Line 1", "Line 2" etc). I expect that each paragraph-object is unique, but actually I get duplicates, in this case 0x25173368. What happens? It is completely against my intuition.

The code:

import win32com.client as win32

word = win32.GetObject(Class="Word.Application")
doc = word.Documents.Open("test.docx")

for para in doc.Paragraphs:
  print repr(para)

The output:

<win32com.gen_py.Microsoft Word 12.0 Object Library.Paragraph instance at 0x25173368>
<win32com.gen_py.Microsoft Word 12.0 Object Library.Paragraph instance at 0x25427240>
<win32com.gen_py.Microsoft Word 12.0 Object Library.Paragraph instance at 0x25173368>
<win32com.gen_py.Microsoft Word 12.0 Object Library.Paragraph instance at 0x25427280>
<win32com.gen_py.Microsoft Word 12.0 Object Library.Paragraph instance at 0x25173368>
<win32com.gen_py.Microsoft Word 12.0 Object Library.Paragraph instance at 0x25427320>
<win32com.gen_py.Microsoft Word 12.0 Object Library.Paragraph instance at 0x25173368>

Answer 1

Iteration over doc.Paragraphs probably creates a Python wrapper object to each underlying COM object dynamically. Since you do not store para anywhere, the wrapper object is destroyed when it goes out of scope, and the next iteration may create a new object at the same memory address.

Try this instead and see if the result is different:

paras = list(doc.Paragraphs)
for para in paras:
    print repr(para)