On 08/27/2012 04:34 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
On Aug 25, 2012, at 09:16 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
A couple of people at PyCon Au mentioned running into this kind of issue with Python 3. It relates to the fact that: 1. String formatting is *coercive* by default 2. Absolutely everything, including bytes objects can be coerced to a string, due to the repr() fallback
So it's relatively easy to miss a decode or encode operation, and end up interpolating an unwanted "b" prefix and some quotes.
For existing versions, I think the easiest answer is to craft a regex that matches bytes object repr's and advise people to check that it *doesn’t* match their formatted strings in their unit tests.
For 3.4+ a non-coercive string interpolation format code may be desirable.
Or maybe just one that calls __str__ without a __repr__ fallback?
b'a'.__str__() "b'a'"
__str__ still returns the bytes literal representation.