Message 212483 - Python tracker (original) (raw)

Admittedly maximum is not correct; however, minimum is not right either. The 10 is the desired (or target) width. Fixed width prints are commonly used with very legacy systems that die a painful death when fixed width strings are parsed by index and a field has spilled over a column. The point is that the format returns a string that is longer than the desired length when a perfectly valid version meets both the format and desired length (making it more correct). The desired length should only be exceeded when no solutions can be found. Note the below statement parses without error. For this reason I feel this is a valid but minor issue. By using a regular expression or slicing the desired result can be achieved, but with extra code. Thanks for the quick response!

-Mark

float('+.12345678')

On Friday, February 28, 2014, Ned Deily <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:

Ned Deily added the comment:

I think you are misunderstanding the meaning of the width component (e.g. the 10 in your example) of a format specification. As described in the documentation, width is a decimal integer defining the minimum field width, not the maximum field width. As necessary, the generated field will be as long as necessary to represent the item as requested by the format spec, but it will be at least "width" characters long.

http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/string.html#format-specification-mini-language

---

nosy: +ned.deily resolution: -> invalid stage: -> committed/rejected status: open -> closed

---

Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org javascript:;> <http://bugs.python.org/issue20811>

---