[Python-Dev] int()'s ValueError behaviour (original) (raw)

Thomas Wouters thomas at python.org
Sun Apr 9 15:30:44 CEST 2006

Someone on IRC (who refuses to report bugs on sourceforge, so I guess he wants to remain anonymous) came with this very amusing bug: int(), when raising ValueError, doesn't quote (or repr(), rather) its arguments:

int("") Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ? ValueError: invalid literal for int(): int("34\n\n\n5") Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ? ValueError: invalid literal for int(): 34

5

Unicode behaviour also isn't always consistent:

int(u'\u0100') Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ? UnicodeEncodeError: 'decimal' codec can't encode character u'\u0100' in position 0: invalid decimal Unicode string int(u'\u09ec', 6) Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ? ValueError: invalid literal for int(): 6

And trying to use the 'decimal' codec directly:

u'6'.encode('decimal') Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ? LookupError: unknown encoding: decimal

I'm not sure if the latter problems are fixable, but the former should be fixed by passing the argument to ValueError through repr(), I think. It's also been suggested (by the reporter, and I agree) that the actual base should be in the errormessage too. Is there some reason not to do this that I've overlooked?

-- Thomas Wouters <thomas at python.org>

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