I've also had to special case strings when dealing with iterables generically, and it's annoying, but it's not a big deal. The real problem is when you meant to pass an iterable of strings and you just passed a single string and it produces confusing behaviour - something more subtle than each character being laid out separately. And even this is not that hard for experienced devs like us to figure out, but it really bites beginners hard, and I think that's the argument worth focusing on.

A common example is when beginners write code like this:

    cursor.execute('INSERT INTO strings VALUES (?)', 'hello')

and get this confusing error:

sqlite3.ProgrammingError: Incorrect number of bindings supplied. The current statement uses 1, and there are 5 supplied.

Finding questions about these is pretty easy, below are some examples:

So first of all, I think we should probably have a check in the sqlite3 library for passing a single string as a parameter.

But in the general case, it would be great if strings weren't iterable and trying to iterate over them raised an exception with a helpful generic message, like:

"Strings are not iterable - you cannot loop over them or treat them as a collection. Perhaps you meant to use string.chars(), string.split(), or string.splitlines()?"