[issue30435] Documentation either unclear or incorrect on comparisons between bytes and strings in Python 3

[ipatrol]

New submission from ipatrol:

https://docs.python.org/3/reference/expressions.html#comparisons says that "Strings and binary sequences cannot be directly compared." That would seem to me to imply that an equality between them would raise an exception, as also claimed by https://wiki.python.org/moin/BytesStr

However, that is manifestly incorrect. Bytes and strings can be compared: they are always unequal. This appears to be a result of the operation falling through to the default comparison, which returns False since they are not identical objects. Equality is a comparison, though it is not an order comparison. A brief search of the word "cannot" in the documentation suggest that saying a certain thing cannot be done usually implies that attempting to do so anyway will raise an exception, typically a TypeError. That this is not the case for string-bytes comparisons should be mentioned.

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assignee: docs at python
components: Documentation
messages: 294200
nosy: docs at python, ipatrol
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Documentation either unclear or incorrect on comparisons between bytes and strings in Python 3
type: behavior
versions: Python 3.3, Python 3.4, Python 3.5, Python 3.6, Python 3.7

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue30435>
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