Akira Li added the comment: C standard defines locale-specific *printing characters* that are [ -~] in "C" locale for implementations that use 7-bit US ASCII character set i.e., SP (space, 0x20) is a printing character in C (isprint() returns nonzero). There is isgraph() function that returns zero for the space but otherwise is equivalent to isprint(). POSIX definition is aligned with the ISO C standard. I don't know what RFC 5822 has to do with this issue but the rfc contradicts itself e.g., in one place it has: "printable US-ASCII characters except SP" that imlies that SP *is* printable but in other places it considers isprint==isgraph. The authors probably meant characters for which isgraph() is nonzero when they use "printable US-ASCII" (that is incorrect according to C standard). Tests from issue9770 show the relation between C character classes and string constants [1]: set(string.printable) == set(C['graph']) + set(C['space']) where C['space'] is '\t\n\v\f\r ' (the standard C whitespace). It is a documented behavior [2]: This is a combination of digits, ascii_letters, punctuation, and whitespace where *whitespace* is C['space']. In Python 2, *printable* is locale-dependent and it coincides with the corresponding Python 3 definition in "C" locale with ASCII charset. Unlike other string constants, *printable* differs from C['print'] on both Python 2 and 3 because it includes whitespace characters other than space. str.isprintable [3] obeys C['print'] (in ASCII range) and considers SP to be printable. --- It might be too late to change string.printable to correspond to C isprint() (for ASCII characters). I've uploaded a documentation patch that mentions that string.printable and str.isprintable differ. [1] http://bugs.python.org/review/9770/diff/12212/Lib/test/test_curses_ascii.py [2] https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/3.4/Doc/library/string.rst#l62 [3] https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/stdtypes.html#str.isprintable ---------- nosy: +akira Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file37441/docs-string.printable.diff _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue23017> _______________________________________