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.