[Python-Dev] transitioning from % to {} formatting (original) (raw)

James Y Knight foom at fuhm.net
Wed Sep 30 07:04:05 CEST 2009

I'm resending a message I sent in June, since it seems the same thread
has come up again, and I don't believe anybody actually responded
(positively or negatively) to the suggestion back then.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-June/090176.html

On Jun 21, 2009, at 5:40 PM, Eric Smith wrote:

I've basically come to accept that %-formatting can never go away, unfortunately. There are too many places where %-formatting is used, for example in logging Formatters. %-formatting either has to exist or it has to be emulated.

It'd possibly be helpful if there were builtin objects which forced
the format style to be either newstyle or oldstyle, independent of
whether % or format was called on it.

E.g. x = newstyle_formatstr("{} {} {}") x % (1,2,3) == x.format(1,2,3) == "1 2 3"

and perhaps, for symmetry: y = oldstyle_formatstr("%s %s %s") y.format(1,2,3) == x % (1,2,3) == "1 2 3"

This allows the format string "style" decision is to be made external
to the API actually calling the formatting function. Thus, it need not
matter as much whether the logging API uses % or .format() internally
-- that only affects the default behavior when a bare string is
passed in.

This could allow for a controlled switch towards the new format string
format, with a long deprecation period for users to migrate:

  1. introduce the above feature, and recommend in docs that people only
    ever use new-style format strings, wrapping the string in
    newstyle_formatstr() when necessary for passing to an API which uses %
    internally.
  2. A long time later...deprecate str.mod; don't deprecate
    newstyle_formatstr.mod.
  3. A while after that (maybe), remove str.mod and replace all
    calls in Python to % (used as a formatting operator) with .format() so
    that the default is to use newstyle format strings for all APIs from
    then on.

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