Consider not using single char variables in docs

Summary.

I was debugging a requests example from the website here (http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/) and was in a PDB session. Went to inspect “r” by typing “r” and <enter> it did not reference the variable “r”.

What you expected.

I expected that it would return the object R

What happened instead.

It returned to the next method, because PDB uses hotkeys.

import requests
r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/user', auth=('user', 'pass'))
import pdb; pdb.set_trace()

Then type ‘r’ in PDB session, will return instead of instance of ‘r’.

Suggestion.

Update the docs to not use single-char variables. I would have sent a PR, but wanted to start here, as it’s more emergent behavior of using PDB and single char vars then a direct requests issue, but is reflected in your examples.

[nateprewitt]

Hi @claudijd, thanks for starting the conversation. While we want to make sure the documentation is easily accessible, I’m not sure this warrants a change. PDB has specifically added syntax to handle this issue. Whenever you’re printing a variable in the console, you should be prefixing it with an ! (e.g. !r) to avoid conflicts.

Given that we cannot control how other tools behave, the new variable could fail elsewhere and we’ll have to continue changing it. For those reasons, I think we’ll pass on this.

[sigmavirus24]

@claudijd no it shouldn’t. The examples are (mostly) shown as if you’ve opened a python prompt, e.g.,

$ python
>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get('https://httpbin.org/get')
>>> r

Not PDB