Bug in PaymentRequest class in lib/paymentrequest.py

From lib/paymentrequest.py at line 187:

class PaymentRequest:

    def __init__(self, data, error=None):
        self.raw = data
        self.error = error
        self.parse(data)
        self.requestor = None # known after verify
        self.tx = None

    def __str__(self):
        return self.raw

^ self.raw above is sometimes a bytes object. This causes python runtime to throw an exception when doing str(request) on a PaymentRequest object (see #770).

I would like to fix this – (perhaps if isinstance(self.raw, bytes)… bla). Or some other approach.

So… what’s the deal here? Suggestions? Should I just fix it by detecting bytes and encoding to string?

[cculianu]

Right you are. The paymentrequest.raw field is actually a bunch of google protocol buffer bytes so … the ‘str’ isn’t meaningful. It’s just for debugging. But – you know – might as well fix it since it’s clearly not to spec… even for debugging. 😃

[marceloneil]

It does make sense that self.raw is bytes, but why implement __str__ in the first place? I’m assuming it was just for debugging