Issue 992397: variable reuse in the logging module (original) (raw)

I accidentally tried to pass logging levels as strings to Logger.log() instead of numbers. The result was that %(levelname)s produced the number of the level specified and %(levelno)s produced the name... I assumed that passing strings was valid, because if you passed an unregistered level name, the %(levelname)s would just say 'Level XYZ' instead of 'XYZ'.

The culprit is this dict in logging/init.py:

_levelNames = { CRITICAL : 'CRITICAL', ERROR : 'ERROR', WARNING : 'WARNING', INFO : 'INFO', DEBUG : 'DEBUG', NOTSET : 'NOTSET', 'CRITICAL' : CRITICAL, 'ERROR' : ERROR, 'WARN' : WARNING, 'WARNING' : WARNING, 'INFO' : INFO, 'DEBUG' : DEBUG, 'NOTSET' : NOTSET, }

I think it would be a good idea to split this dict into two, so that such confusion doesn't result. Also, it should be explicitly stated (in the docs and maybe in code too) if a name of the level as a string argument to Logger.log() is valid or not.