[Python-Dev] sWAPcASE Was: transform() and untransform() methods, and the codec registry (original) (raw)

Eric Smith eric at trueblade.com
Fri Dec 10 00:10:38 CET 2010

On 12/9/2010 5:54 PM, Raymond Hettinger wrote:

It would make me happy if we could agree to kill or at least mortally wound str.swapcase(). I did some research on what it is go for and found that it is a vestige of an old word processor command to handle the case where a user accidentally left the caps lock key turned-on. AFAICT using Google's code search, it has nearly zero value for Python scripts. It does have a cost however, the code search turned-up many cases where people were writing string like objects and included swapcase() just so they could match the built-in API.

It's time for swapcase() to go the way of the dinosaurs.

+1, assuming the normal deprecation process.

If we're looking to reduce the number of methods on str, I wouldn't mind seeing center() and zfill() also go away, since they're trivially replaced by format().

'3'.zfill(10) '0000000003' format('3', '>010') '0000000003'

'3'.center(10) ' 3 ' format('3', '^10') ' 3 '

'3'.center(10, '-') '----3-----' format('3', '-^10') '----3-----'

Although I'll grant this the case for the demise of center() and zfill() isn't as strong as for swapcase(). It's truly useless.

Eric.

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