harmful str(bytes)

[Hrvoje Niksic]

Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de> writes:

> Hallvard B Furuseth, 11.10.2010 23:45:
>> If there were a __plain_str__() method which was supposed to fail rather
>> than start to babble Python syntax, and if there were not plenty of
>> Python code around which invoked __str__, I'd agree.
>
> Yes, calling str() "just in case" has a clear code smell. I think
> that's one of the reasons why b'abc' was chosen as output of
> bytes.__str__, to make it clearly visible a) what the type of the
> value is, e.g. in an interactive session

Isn't that the point of repr()?

> I think raising an exception in bytes.__str__ would be a horrible
> thing to do. That would make it really hard and dangerous to look at
> bytes objects in a debugger or interpreter session.

Again, the interactive interpreter prints out the repr, and so should
debuggers, etc.  In fact, when the object is embedded in a container,
all you get is the repr anyway.