Following up: drats! Detecting this conceptual TypeError is not feasible under the current design, due to the choice of data representation used in this API.
The reason is because the flags are being represented as integers, and we're using bitwise operations to define the union of flags. That is: ####################################### >>> import re >>> re.MULTILINE 8 >>> re.DOTALL 16 >>> re.MULTILINE | re.DOTALL 24 ######################################## Flags are integers here. Since re.sub is taking two optional integer-based arguments, count and flags, Python's type system cannot determine that we've passed flags in the wrong place, because it legitimately looks like a valid count too. Bits are bits. This is a very rough design edge and quite unfortunate. In an ideal world, I can imagine that the representation of flags would be different such that this mistake could be caught earlier. But in absence of this, we've just got to be careful, I suppose. :( Anyway, hope this helps! _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
