[Python-Dev] summary of transitioning from % to {} formatting
Antoine Pitrou
solipsis at pitrou.net
Sat Oct 3 18:23:24 CEST 2009
> Define "fails":
>
> >>> "{a} {b} c" % {'a':12}
> '{a} {b} c'
>
> That didn't fail...
Ah, my bad. I had completely overlooked that formatting was laxist when
faced with unused named parameters.
Then we need something smarter, like counting the number of unescaped
"%" characters, the number of pairs of braces, and try first the
formatting style expecting the greatest number of parameters. It can
either be done cheaply in Python, or more rigourously by providing an
extra API to the existing C parsing routines.
This might look fragile, but we should not forget that we are talking
about uses - logging, etc. - which will most of time involve very simple
format strings, such that making an automatic decision is not too
difficult. In the more undecideable cases, the heuristic might decide to
raise an exception and require the developer to specify the formatting
style explicitly (by adding e.g. style='%' or style='{}' to the method
call).
Regards
Antoine.
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