default seems broken

Hi there,

I’ve just updated from 0.4.4 to 0.4.5 and noticed a few unexpected behaviours with default. Presumably they relate to the casting changes that were introduced recently?

# the key is in my env
In [3]: env('GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY')
Out[3]: 'UA-123456-78'

# I should have used a string as default here
# but I would still expect these to return my key instead of False

In [4]: env('GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY', default=False)
Out[4]: False

In [7]: env('GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY', default=True)
Out[7]: False

# these ones work as expected

In [5]: env('GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY', default='')
Out[5]: 'UA-123456-78'

In [6]: env('GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY', default=None)
Out[6]: 'UA-123456-78'

Cheers, Matthieu

[pablobuenaposada]

I have been taking a look at this and I cannot see any benefit of this smart casting from default type.

To have a variable that normally is supposed to contain for example an int but in case of no definition from the env you want to explicitly set it to None or False is something common, with the new version this is not possible anymore, you are killing the dynamic typing Python offers.

If you want to force type casting for a specific variable you can currently do it like this:

>>> import environ
>>> env = environ.Env()
>>> env('HOME')
'/Users/pablobuenaposada'
>>> env('HOME', cast=list)
['/Users/pablobuenaposada']

this is ok, is working fine, but if you don’t specify any type casting I think it shouldn’t do it for you because is a feature.

Why not revert this smart cast changes?

[kozlek]

Same for me. Avoid using python True or False with the default parameter.