Wandering Thoughts archives

2014-12-13

There are two parts to making your code work with Python 3

In my not terribly extensive experience so far, in the general case porting your code to Python 3 is really two steps in one, not a single process. First, you need to revise your code so that it runs on Python 3 at all; it uses print(), it imports modules under their new names, and so on. Some amount of this can be automated by 2to3 and similar tools, although not all of it. As I discovered, a great deal of this is basically synonymous with modernizing your code to the current best practice for Python 2.7. I believe that almost all of the necessary changes will still work on Python 2.7 without hacks (certainly things like print() will with the right imports from __future__).

After your code will theoretically run at all, you need to revise your code so that it handles strings in Unicode, and it means that calling this process 'porting' is not really a good label. The moment you deal with Unicode you need to consider both character encoding conversion points and what you do on errors. Dealing with Unicode is extra work and confronting it may well require at least a thorough exploration of your code and perhaps a deep rethink of your design. This is not at all like the effort to revise your code to Python 3 idioms.

(And some people will have serious problems, although future Python 3 versions are dealing with some of the problems.)

Code that has already been written to the latest Python 2.7 idioms will need relatively little revision for Python 3's basic requirements, although I think it always needs some just to cope with renamed modules. Code that was already dealing very carefully with Unicode on Python 2.7 will need little or no revision to deal with Python 3's more forced Unicode model, because it's already effectively operating in that model anyways (although possibly imperfectly in ways that were camouflaged by Python 2.7's handling of this issue).

The direct corollary is that both the amount and type of work you need to do to get your code running under Python 3 depends very much on what it does today with strings and Unicode on Python 2. 'Clean' code that already lives in a Unicode world will have one experience; 'sloppy' code will have an entirely different one. This means that the process and experience of making code work on Python 3 is not at all monolithic. Different people with different code bases will have very different experiences, depending on what their code does (and on how much they need to consider corner cases and encoding errors).

(I think that Python 3 basically just works for almost all string handling if your system locale is a UTF-8 one and you never deal with any input that isn't UTF-8 and so never are confronted with decoding errors. Since this describes a great many people's environments and assumptions, simplistic Python 3 code can get very far. If you're in such a simple environment, the second step of Python 3 porting also disappears; your code works on Python 3 the moment it runs, possibly better than it did on Python 2.)

python/Python3PortingTwoParts written at 01:12:45; Add Comment


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