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Tuesday, March 15, 2016
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Here in summary the problem which locked me for almost one week
(:ticket:`825`):
>>> from builtins import str
>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
>>> a = ET.Element('a')
>>> a.set(str('name'), str('10'))
>>> ET.dump(a)
Above output (which of course is invalid XML syntax) comes under
Python 2. Under Python 3 it is correct::
The explanation is that `python-future `__
introduces a special helper class `newstr` to simulate, under Python
2, the behaviour of Python 3 strings.
But `xml.etree.ElementTree
`__
doesn't know about `python-future` and produces invalid XML when you
feed it with such a string.
If you use `ElementTree` and want to support both 2 and 3, then avoid
`newstr` and use `six.text_type` instead. After all `python-future`
is a higher-level compatibility layer than six which tries to save you
some work.
Because the same problem occured in other places as well, I
tried to systematically replace all::
from builtins import str
by::
import six
str = six.text_type
But that was not good. Many doctests now failed again because one
advantage of future's `newstr` class was to get printed without the
"u" in front of the string literal... This example shows that the
`newstr` class is not a useless luxus.
Lino fulfilling your biggest wishes
===================================
I have about four customers who are urgently waiting for me advancing
with their project. How to chose which one to serve first? Today I
used a new technique:
- I intuitively chose one of them. (Today it was Alexa because I
believe that she is the one who is most locked without my
progress. The others aren't less important but they have lots of
other things to do as well.)
- I asked her "What is your biggest wish? (only one, and only from
those which I am able to fulfill)"
- She answered without hesitation: :ticket:`766`. Her non hesitating
answer was a confirmation that she was the right candidate to get a
wish fulfilled.
- I worked a few hours on :ticket:`766` to fullfill her wish, then did
a release.
And now I will hopefully sleep well and long.