We've already gotten our code base running under Python 2.6. In order to prepare for Python 3.0, we've started adding:
from __future__ import unicode_literals
into our .py files (as we modify them). I'm wondering if anyone else has been doing this and has run into any non-obvious gotchas (perhaps after spending a lot of time debugging).
The main source of problems I've had working with unicode strings is when you mix utf-8 encoded strings with unicode ones.
For example, consider the following scripts.
two.py
# encoding: utf-8
name = 'helló wörld from two'
one.py
# encoding: utf-8
from __future__ import unicode_literals
import two
name = 'helló wörld from one'
print name + two.name
The output of running python one.py is:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "one.py", line 5, in <module>
print name + two.name
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)
In this example, two.name is an utf-8 encoded string (not unicode) since it did not import unicode_literals, and one.name is an unicode string. When you mix both, python tries to decode the encoded string (assuming it's ascii) and convert it to unicode and fails. It would work if you did print name + two.name.decode('utf-8').
The same thing can happen if you encode a string and try to mix them later. For example, this works:
# encoding: utf-8
html = '<html><body>helló wörld</body></html>'
if isinstance(html, unicode):
html = html.encode('utf-8')
print 'DEBUG: %s' % html
Output:
DEBUG: <html><body>helló wörld</body></html>
But after adding the import unicode_literals it does NOT:
# encoding: utf-8
from __future__ import unicode_literals
html = '<html><body>helló wörld</body></html>'
if isinstance(html, unicode):
html = html.encode('utf-8')
print 'DEBUG: %s' % html
Output:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "test.py", line 6, in <module>
print 'DEBUG: %s' % html
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 16: ordinal not in range(128)
It fails because 'DEBUG: %s' is an unicode string and therefore python tries to decode html. A couple of ways to fix the print are either doing print str('DEBUG: %s') % html or print 'DEBUG: %s' % html.decode('utf-8').
I hope this helps you understand the potential gotchas when using unicode strings.
when you mix utf-8 encoded strings with unicode ones UTF-8 and Unicode anen't 2 different encodings; Unicode is a standard and UTF-8 is one of encodings that it defines. –
Fishman str, the latter is type unicode. Being different objects, problem may arise if you try to sum/concatenate/interpolate them –
Irby python>=2.6 or python==2.6? –
Vandal Also in 2.6 (before python 2.6.5 RC1+) unicode literals doesn't play nice with keyword arguments (issue4978):
The following code for example works without unicode_literals, but fails with TypeError: keywords must be string if unicode_literals is used.
>>> def foo(a=None): pass
...
>>> foo(**{'a':1})
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: foo() keywords must be strings
I did find that if you add the unicode_literals directive you should also add something like:
# -*- coding: utf-8
to the first or second line your .py file. Otherwise lines such as:
foo = "barré"
result in an an error such as:
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xc3' in file mumble.py on line 198, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
# -*- coding: utf-8 is a virtually mandatory statement regardless if you use unicode_literals or not –
Irby -*- is not required; if you were going for the emacs-compatible way, I think you'd be needing -*- encoding: utf-8 -*- (see the -*- at the end also). All you need is coding: utf-8 (or even = instead of : ). –
Inamorata from __future__ import unicode_literals. –
Premillenarian # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- with "coding" (not "encoding" or "fileencoding" or anything else - Python just looks for "coding" regardless of any prefix). –
Piddle Also take into account that unicode_literal will affect eval() but not repr() (an asymmetric behavior which imho is a bug), i.e. eval(repr(b'\xa4')) won't be equal to b'\xa4' (as it would with Python 3).
Ideally, the following code would be an invariant, which should always work, for all combinations of unicode_literals and Python {2.7, 3.x} usage:
from __future__ import unicode_literals
bstr = b'\xa4'
assert eval(repr(bstr)) == bstr # fails in Python 2.7, holds in 3.1+
ustr = '\xa4'
assert eval(repr(ustr)) == ustr # holds in Python 2.7 and 3.1+
The second assertion happens to work, since repr('\xa4') evaluates to u'\xa4' in Python 2.7.
repr to regenerate an object. The repr documentation clearly states that this is not a requirement. In my opinion, this relegates repr to something useful only for debugging. –
Primitive There are more.
There are libraries and builtins that expect strings that don't tolerate unicode.
Two examples:
builtin:
myenum = type('Enum', (), enum)
(slightly esotic) doesn't work with unicode_literals: type() expects a string.
library:
from wx.lib.pubsub import pub
pub.sendMessage("LOG MESSAGE", msg="no go for unicode literals")
doesn't work: the wx pubsub library expects a string message type.
The former is esoteric and easily fixed with
myenum = type(b'Enum', (), enum)
but the latter is devastating if your code is full of calls to pub.sendMessage() (which mine is).
Dang it, eh?!?
class Meta: should be b'field_name' –
Seow Click will raise unicode exceptions all over the place if any module that has from __future__ import unicode_literals is imported where you use click.echo. It's a nightmare…
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decode()solutions instead of thestr()orencode()solutions: the more often you use Unicode objects, the clearer the code is, since what you want is to manipulate strings of characters, not arrays of bytes with an externally implied encoding. – Fordham