Issue 33567: Explicitly mention bytes and other buffers in the documentation for float() (original) (raw)
float(bytesobject) treats the contents of the bytesobject as a sequence of ASCII characters, and converts those to a float value as if you used float(bytesobject.decode('ASCII')). The same support is extended to other objects implementing the buffer protocol.
The documentation, however, doesn't mention this:
Return a floating point number constructed from a number or string x.
Everywhere else in the functions documentation, "string" refers to an object of type str
. Please make it explicit that bytes
is also acceptedable, like it does for the int() documentation.