Martin v. Loewis, 04.09.2010 18:52:
Am 01.09.2010 23:32, schrieb Stef Mientki:
in winpdb I see strings like this:
>>> a = b'string'
>>> a
'string'
>>> type(a)
<type 'str'>
what's the "b" doing in front of the string ?
It's redundant.
Not completely. (I know that you know this, but to those who don't, your
answer may be misleading.)
If you use 2to3 to convert the above to Python 3 code, it will leave the
'b' in front of the string, so the resulting string literal will be a bytes
string in Python 3. If you remove it, the string will become a unicode
literal. Since the code is syntax compatible with Python 3, simply running
it in a Python 3 interpreter will also show this behaviour.
So it's redundant in Python 2, but it's no longer redundant when you plan
to migrate the code to Python 3.
Stefan
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