[Tutor] %s %r with cutom type

[spir]

Hello again,

A different issue. On the custom Unicode type discussed in another thread, I have overloaded __str__ and __repr__ to get encoded byte strings (here with debug prints & special formats to distinguish from builtin forms):

class Unicode(unicode):
    ENCODING = "utf8"
    def __new__(self, string='', encoding=None):
        if isinstance(string,str):
            encoding = Unicode.ENCODING if encoding is None else encoding
            string = string.decode(encoding)
        return unicode.__new__(Unicode, string)
    def __repr__(self):
        print '+',
        return '"%s"' %(self.__str__())
    def __str__(self):
        print '*',
        return '`'+ self.encode(Unicode.ENCODING) + '`'

An issue happens in particuliar cases, when using both %s and %r:

s = "éâÄ"
us = Unicode(s)
# str
print us,
print str(us),
print us.__str__(),
print "%s" %us
# repr
print repr(us),
print us.__repr__(),
print "%r" %us
# both
print "%s %r" %(us,us)

==>

éâÄ * `éâÄ` * `éâÄ` éâÄ
+ * "`éâÄ`" + * "`éâÄ`" + * "`éâÄ`"
+ *
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "Unicode.py", line 38, in <module>
    print "%s%r" %(us,us)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 2: ordinal not in range(128)

Note that Unicode.__str__ is called neither by "print us", nore by %s. What happens? Why does the issue only occur when using both format %s & %s?

If I replace the last line by "print "%s %r" %(str(us),us)", all works fine. But then what's the point with %s? And why doesn't print alone call __str__?

Denis