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ansible/docs/docsite/rst/dev_guide/testing/sanity/no-unicode-literals.rst
Toshio Kuratomi ff13d58c14 Remove use of unicode_literals as it is an anti-pattern 
from __future__ unicode_literals leads to developer confusion as
developers no longer can tell whether a bare literal string is a byte
string or a unicode string.  Explicit marking as u"" or b"" is the way
to solve the same problem in the Ansbile codebase.
2017-09-11 13:33:51 -07:00

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Sanity Tests » no-unicode_literals

The use of from __future__ import unicode_literals has been deemed an anti-pattern. The problems with it are:

  • It makes it so one can't jump into the middle of a file and know whether a bare literal string is a byte string or text string. The programmer has to first check the top of the file to see if the import is there.
  • It removes the ability to define native strings (a string which should be a byte string on python2 and a text string on python3) via a string literal.
  • It makes for more context switching. A programmer could be reading one file which has unicode_literals and know that bare string literals are text strings but then switch to another file (perhaps tracing program execution into a third party library) and have to switch their understanding of what bare string literals are.