Issue 21011: PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords doesn't take const char *keywords[] (original) (raw)

Issue21011

Created on 2014-03-21 16:45 by h.venev, last changed 2022-04-11 14:58 by admin.

Messages (4)
msg214388 - (view)	Author: Hristo Venev (h.venev) *	Date: 2014-03-21 16:45
This really annoys me. I have to store the literals in char[] and then make a char*[] from them. It would be better if a simple array of string literals could be used. It would also require less data space because string literals could be merged by the compiler. I don't know why PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords would ever modify the keywords array so it makes absolutely no sense to me for the array not to be const char*[]. In all cases I have seen PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords being used string literals were converted to char* (dropping const) which is far far worse than inefficient code.
msg214857 - (view)	Author: Josh Rosenberg (josh.r) *	Date: 2014-03-25 22:02
This has come up before. Links to additional info: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-February/060689.html http://bugs.python.org/issue1772673
msg320945 - (view)	Author: Inada Naoki (methane) *	Date: 2018-07-03 09:06
I think we can't fix this until Python 4. May I close this issue as "won't fix" for now? Or can we add "Python 4" keyword to list backward incompatible changes we want to do in the future?
msg320952 - (view)	Author: Serhiy Storchaka (serhiy.storchaka) *	Date: 2018-07-03 09:45
We can't change this API because this would break virtually all user code. But we can introduce a macro like PY_SSIZE_T_CLEAN. If it is defined before including Python.h, PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() will take an array of const strings. This will help for compatibility with C++.