[Python-Dev] PEP 460 reboot (original) (raw)

Daniel Holth dholth at gmail.com
Mon Jan 13 03:30:35 CET 2014

On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 9:18 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 6:07 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:

Is there a formatting character that means "anything except a unicode string" to prevent accidentally interpolating a Unicode string into a bytes string without [a sane] encoding? No, and we shouldn't introduce one. An operation should either work for no type, one type, a few specific types, or all types. Something that works for all but one type will appear to work for all types to a casually experimenting user and may pass extensive unittests, leaving a bomb that can detonate when you least expect it.

That pretty much describes how I feel about str(bytes). I would accept "only a bytes" or "only a string" as consolation formatting characters :-)

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