[New-bugs-announce] [issue29002] typing.AnyStr doc is unclear about python2 unicode support

[Alex Jurkiewicz]

New submission from Alex Jurkiewicz:

The typing.AnyStr documentation:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html#typing.AnyStr

It gives some examples using u-strings (u'foo') but doesn't make explicit some subtleties about behaviour with Python 2. Specifically, with Python 2 all the given examples work, and even this works:

concat("foo", u"bar")

Which seems contrary to the goal of AnyStr being "used for functions that may accept any kind of string without allowing different kinds of strings to mix".

I think the documentation should call out that for Python 2, AnyStr doesn't distinguish between str & unicode, and mention that in python 2, b'str' is equivalent to 'str' (I know this is mentioned elsewhere, but it seems useful to repeat it here).

----------
assignee: docs at python
components: Documentation
messages: 283524
nosy: aj, docs at python
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: typing.AnyStr doc is unclear about python2 unicode support
type: enhancement
versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.3, Python 3.4, Python 3.5, Python 3.6, Python 3.7

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue29002>
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