Ethan Furman <et...@stoneleaf.us> writes: > On 12/14/2014 11:29 PM, Ben Finney wrote: > > The ‘__import__’ built-in function, though, is tripping up. > > One work-around I have used is: > > if isinstance(some_var, bytes): > some_var = some_var.decode('ascii') > # at this point some_var is unicode in both Pythons
That's not the issue at all. I know how to declare a literal such that it is Unicode in Python 2 and Python 3 (that's what the ‘from __future__ import unicode_literals’ does). Rather, the problem is ‘__import__’ having incompatible expectations: the ‘fromlist’ parameter's items must be bytes in Python 2, and must be Unicode in Python 3. The same parameter value can't satisfy both those requirements in a single 2-and-3 compatible code base, without either using the bytes-and-text ambiguity of ‘str’, or some kludge over-riding a simple ‘__import__’ call. Both of those are ugly and make for buggy code. I'm increasingly of the opinion this is a subtle bug in ‘__import__’ that should be fixed instead of worked around. But it will likely be rejected because the documentation advises against using ‘__import__’. Bah. -- \ “Try adding “as long as you don't breach the terms of service – | `\ according to our sole judgement” to the end of any cloud | _o__) computing pitch.” —Simon Phipps, 2010-12-11 | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list