Okay, so I wanted to mess around with the “six” library in Python again, you know, for making my code work nicely with both Python 2 and 3. This time, I thought I’d tackle something a bit more specific – hence “six 2”. It wasn’t a huge project, just a little utility script, but I figured it was a good way to get more hands-on.
Getting Started
First thing I did was to make a new virtual environment. It is important to me. I always do this for every new project, even small ones, just to keep things tidy and avoid any package conflicts. I fired up my terminal and used the “virtualenv” command. After activating it, of course, I installed “six” using pip. The usual drill. Pretty simple.
Writing the Script
Then I got down to writing the actual code. My script needed to handle some text input, and I knew that string handling can be a bit different between Python 2 and 3. Python 2 treats strings as byte strings by default, while Python 3 uses Unicode strings. This is where “six” is really important.
I used *_type to make sure I was always working with Unicode strings, regardless of the Python version. Also I used *_types when I needed to check if a variable was a string, you know, it covers both str and unicode in Python 2.
Testing, Testing
After getting the basic functionality down, I wrote some tests. I like to use the “unittest” module that comes with Python. I created a test class and added a few methods to check different cases, such as string checking and text type conversions. You know, the basic stuff to make sure my script behaves as expected in both Python 2 and 3 environments.
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Test Case 1
I tested the type of the data, regardless of the Python version I ran it in, it could be guaranteed to be the type I wanted.
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Test Case 2
I also want to test whether the string type is correct, I will input some parameters of different types to test.
The important part was to actually run the tests in both Python 2 and 3! I switched between my virtual environments and ran the tests using the “python -m unittest” command. It felt good to see all those “OK” messages popping up in both versions. This proved to me that “six” was helping me to achieve cross-version compatibility.
Wrapping Up
Finally, I cleaned up the code a bit, added some comments, and that’s it. My little utility script with six 2 was ready. It wasn’t rocket science, but it was a good learning exercise. It’s made me more comfortable using “six” and given me more confidence for tackling bigger projects that need to work in both Python versions. I’m happy with my result.
