Issue 7348: StringIO.StringIO.readline(-1) returns the wrong result compared to other file-like objects (original) (raw)

You specified neither version nor system. On 3.1, Windows

from io import StringIO as s s('a\nb\nfoo').readline(-1)

'a\n'

which, I gather, is what you describe as expected, although using -1 to mean None is rather weird.

The 3.1 doc says only "readline(limit=-1) Read and return one line from the stream. If limit is specified, at most limit bytes will be read." which would imply that negative numbers are the same as 0.

So even in 3.1, either the behavior is wrong or the doc is incomplete.