[New-bugs-announce] [issue32431] Two bytes objects of zero length don't compare equal

[Jonathan Underwood]

New submission from Jonathan Underwood <jonathan.underwood at gmail.com>:

With the current logic in Objects/bytesobject.c in the function bytes_compare_eq it can be the case that zero length bytes object object created in an extension module like this:

val = PyBytes_FromStringAndSize (NULL, 20);
Py_SIZE(val) = 0;

won't compare equal to b'' because the memory is not initialized, so the first two bytes won't be equal. Nonetheless, the Python interpreter does return b'' for print(repr(val)), so this behaviour is very confusing. To get the correct behaviour, one would have to initialize the memory:

val = PyBytes_FromStringAndSize (NULL, 20);
c = PyBytes_AS_STRING (val);
c[0] = '\0';
Py_SIZE(val) = 0;

However, it would be more sensible to fix the logic in bytes_compare_eq in my opinion. That function should return true for two zero length bytes objects, irrespective of the memory contents.

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components: Interpreter Core
messages: 309086
nosy: jonathanunderwood
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Two bytes objects of zero length don't compare equal
type: behavior
versions: Python 3.6

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue32431>
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