[Python-Dev] eval and triple quoted strings (original) (raw)

Ron Adam ron3200 at gmail.com
Sun Jun 16 04:00:13 CEST 2013

On 06/15/2013 03:23 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

The semantics of raw strings are clear. I don't see that they should be called out especially in any context. (Except for regexps.) Usually exec() is not used with a literal anyway (what would be the point).

There are about a hundred instances of eval/exec(some_string_literal) in pythons library. Most of them in the tests, and maybe about half of those testing the compiler, eval, and exec.

egrep -owr --include=".py" "(eval|exec)(('.'|".*"))" * | wc -l 114

I have no idea in how many places a string literal is assigned to a name first and then used later in eval or exec. It's harder to grep for but would be less than...

egrep -owr --include="*.py" "(eval|exec)(.*)" * | wc -l 438

That's overstated because some of those are comments, and some may be functions with the name ending with eval or exec.

I do think that eval and exec is a similar case to regexps. And possibly often enough, the string may contain a raw string, regular expression, or a file/path name.

Only a short note needed in the docs for eval, nothing more. And not even that if no thinks it's an issue.

cheers, Ron

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