Vedran Čačić added the comment:
By that line of reasoning, we would probably never change anything. :-( I
searched the documentation, and the exact behaviour isn't documented anywhere.
In fact all examples are of the kind where there is an even number of fill
chars. I thought it was ok to "break" undocumented things.
As for a practical problem, here is how I encountered it. I had a format that
centered something inside a constant-width column. format("^79", title) it was,
I think. Then, as it usually happens, things were generalized and the width was
customizable. Of course, I could have used "{:^{}}".format(title, width), but
title.center(width) really seemed like a better option.
Imagine my horror when a test failed. At first I thought, ok, format puts extra
space on one side, .center at the other, no big deal. But then I changed it,
and it failed again. Many time and lost nerves later (not something I usually
associate with Python), I realized that those two use different _methods_ of
calculating the distribution of spaces.
At that moment, I really thought it must be a bug. But I went to the docs, and
they never said anything about where an extra fill char is put. So yes, it is
_theoretically_ possible that this is exactly the intended behaviour. But I
really think it's not the case.
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<http://bugs.python.org/issue23624>
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