[New-bugs-announce] [issue24731] Incorrect assert in str_subtype_new

[Kevin Modzelewski]

New submission from Kevin Modzelewski:

(Using python 3 terminology)  str_subtype_new is the function that creates instances of any subtypes of bytes (ie is called by bytes_new if the requested type is not PyBytes_Type -- looks like this function's name comes from python 2).  Its approach is to create a bytes object using the same arguments, and then copy the resulting data into the subclass-instance's memory.  It does

    tmp = bytes_new(&PyBytes_Type, args, kwds);
    [error checking]
    assert(PyBytes_CheckExact(tmp));

The problem is that bytes_new can return a subclass of bytes, if the argument provides a __bytes__ method that returns a bytes-subtype.  For example

    class MyBytes(bytes):
        pass
    class C(object):
        def __bytes__(self):
            return MyBytes(b"hello world")
    MyBytes(C()) # fails the assert

This doesn't seem to cause any issues other than the failing assert in debug builds; it seems like the assert should just be relaxed from PyBytes_CheckExact to PyBytes_Check since that's enough to guarantee that the upcoming manipulation of the "tmp" variable is going to be valid.  Also, this would match how unicode_subtype_new behaves.

This bug also applies to Python 2, since I think the relevant code is the same, though in that case it applies to str instead of bytes.

----------
components: Interpreter Core
messages: 247451
nosy: Kevin Modzelewski
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Incorrect assert in str_subtype_new
versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.5

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue24731>
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