[Python-Dev] Format strings, Unicode, and Py2.7: need clarification (original) (raw)

Eric V. Smith eric at trueblade.com
Wed May 17 21:56:59 EDT 2017

On May 17, 2017, at 2:41 PM, Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc at crodrigues.org> wrote:

Hi, While cleaning up some code during Python 2 -> Python 3 porting, I switched some code to use str.format(), I found this behavor: Python 2.7 ========= a = "%s" % "hi" b = "%s" % u"hi" c = u"%s" % "hi" d = "{}".format("hi") e = "{}".format(u"hi") f = u"{}".format("hi") type(a) == str type(b) == unicode type(c) == unicode type(d) == str type(e) == str type(f) == unicode My intuition would lead me to believe that type(b) and type(e) would be the same (unicode), but they are not. The confusion for me is why is type(e) of type str, and not unicode? Can someone clarify this for me?

I think it's because I wanted to return str if possible, and didn't want to find out that one of the calls to format returned unicode, and then go back and convert all of the previous results to unicode from str.

And, I guess we didn't consider it important enough at the time.

Eric.

I understand that in Python 3, all these cases are str, so it is not as big a problem there, but I am trying to keep things working on Python 2.7.

Thanks. -- Craig

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