StringIO in 2.6 and beyond

[Christian Heimes]

Bill McClain wrote:
> I've just installed 2.6, had been using 2.4.
> 
> This was working for me:
> 
>     #! /usr/bin/env python
>     import StringIO
>     out = StringIO.StringIO()
>     print >> out, 'hello'
> 
> I used 2to3, and added import from future to get:
> 
>     #! /usr/bin/env python
>     from __future__ import print_function
>     import io
>     out = io.StringIO()
>     print('hello', file=out)
> 
> ....which gives an error:
> 
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "./example.py", line 5, in <module>
>     print('hello', file=out)
>   File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/io.py", line 1487, in write
>     s.__class__.__name__)
> TypeError: can't write str to text stream
> 
> ....which has me stumped. Why can't it?

In this context 'str' means Python 3.0's str type, which is unicode in 
2.x. Please report the misleading error message.

Christian