Documentation for "str()" could use some adjustment.

John Nagle nagle at animats.com
Mon Mar 19 02:49:27 EDT 2007


The Python documentation for "str" says
"str([object]) :
     Return a string containing a nicely printable representation of an object."

However, there's no mention of the fact that "str" of a Unicode string
with non-ASCII characters will raise a conversion exception.  The
documentation (and several Python books) seem to indicate that "str" will
produce some "printable representation" for anything, not raise an exception.

I know, it was proposed in PEP 349 to change "str" to return Unicode
strings, and that's coming someday, along with all-Unicode Python,
but meanwhile, the documentation should be clear about this.

				John Nagle



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