flake8-bugbear 17.3.0

A plugin for flake8 finding likely bugs and design problems in your program. Contains warnings that don't belong in pyflakes and pycodestyle.

A plugin for Flake8 finding likely bugs and design problems in your program. Contains warnings that don’t belong in pyflakes and pycodestyle:

bug·bear  (bŭg′bâr′)
n.
1. A cause of fear, anxiety, or irritation: *Overcrowding is often
   a bugbear for train commuters.*
2. A difficult or persistent problem: *"One of the major bugbears of
   traditional AI is the difficulty of programming computers to
   recognize that different but similar objects are instances of the
   same type of thing" (Jack Copeland).*
3. A fearsome imaginary creature, especially one evoked to frighten
   children.

List of warnings

B001: Do not use bare except:, it also catches unexpected events like memory errors, interrupts, system exit, and so on. Prefer except Exception:. If you’re sure what you’re doing, be explicit and write except BaseException:. Disable E722 to avoid duplicate warnings.

B002: Python does not support the unary prefix increment. Writing ++n is equivalent to +(+(n)), which equals n. You meant n += 1.

B003: Assigning to os.environ doesn’t clear the environment. Subprocesses are going to see outdated variables, in disagreement with the current process. Use os.environ.clear() or the env= argument to Popen.

B004: Using hasattr(x, '__call__') to test if x is callable is unreliable. If x implements custom __getattr__ or its __call__ is itself not callable, you might get misleading results. Use callable(x) for consistent results.

B005: Using .strip() with multi-character strings is misleading the reader. It looks like stripping a substring. Move your character set to a constant if this is deliberate. Use .replace() or regular expressions to remove string fragments.

B006: Do not use mutable data structures for argument defaults. All calls reuse one instance of that data structure, persisting changes between them.

B007: Loop control variable not used within the loop body. If this is intended, start the name with an underscore.

Python 3 compatibility warnings

These have higher risk of false positives but discover regressions that are dangerous to slip through when test coverage is not great. Let me know if a popular library is triggering any of the following warnings for valid code.

B301: Python 3 does not include .iter* methods on dictionaries. The default behavior is to return iterables. Simply remove the iter prefix from the method. For Python 2 compatibility, also prefer the Python 3 equivalent if you expect that the size of the dict to be small and bounded. The performance regression on Python 2 will be negligible and the code is going to be the clearest. Alternatively, use six.iter* or future.utils.iter*.

B302: Python 3 does not include .view* methods on dictionaries. The default behavior is to return viewables. Simply remove the view prefix from the method. For Python 2 compatibility, also prefer the Python 3 equivalent if you expect that the size of the dict to be small and bounded. The performance regression on Python 2 will be negligible and the code is going to be the clearest. Alternatively, use six.view* or future.utils.view*.

B303: The __metaclass__ attribute on a class definition does nothing on Python 3. Use class MyClass(BaseClass, metaclass=...). For Python 2 compatibility, use six.add_metaclass.

B304: sys.maxint is not a thing on Python 3. Use sys.maxsize.

B305: .next() is not a thing on Python 3. Use the next() builtin. For Python 2 compatibility, use six.next().

B306: BaseException.message has been deprecated as of Python 2.6 and is removed in Python 3. Use str(e) to access the user-readable message. Use e.args to access arguments passed to the exception.

Opinionated warnings

The following warnings are disabled by default because they are controversial. They may or may not apply to you, enable them explicitly in your configuration if you find them useful. Read below on how to enable.

B901: Using return x in a generator function used to be syntactically invalid in Python 2. In Python 3 return x can be used in a generator as a return value in conjunction with yield from. Users coming from Python 2 may expect the old behavior which might lead to bugs. Use native async def coroutines or mark intentional return x usage with # noqa on the same line.

B902: Invalid first argument used for method. Use self for instance methods, and cls for class methods (which includes __new__ and __init_subclass__) or instance methods of metaclasses (detected as classes directly inheriting from type).

B903: Use collections.namedtuple (or typing.NamedTuple) for data classes that only set attributes in an __init__ method, and do nothing else. If the attributes should be mutable, define the attributes in __slots__ to save per-instance memory and to prevent accidentally creating additional attributes on instances.

B950: Line too long. This is a pragmatic equivalent of pycodestyle’s E501: it considers “max-line-length” but only triggers when the value has been exceeded by more than 10%. You will no longer be forced to reformat code due to the closing parenthesis being one character too far to satisfy the linter. At the same time, if you do significantly violate the line length, you will receive a message that states what the actual limit is. This is inspired by Raymond Hettinger’s “Beyond PEP 8” talk and highway patrol not stopping you if you drive < 5mph too fast. Disable E501 to avoid duplicate warnings.

How to enable opinionated warnings

To enable these checks, specify a --select command-line option or select= option in your config file. As of Flake8 3.0, this option is a whitelist (checks not listed are being implicitly disabled), so you have to explicitly specify all checks you want enabled. For example:

[flake8]
max-line-length = 80
max-complexity = 12
...
select = C,E,F,W,B,B901

Note that we’re enabling the complexity checks, the PEP8 pycodestyle errors and warnings, the pyflakes fatals and all default Bugbear checks. Finally, we’re also specifying B901 as a check that we want enabled.

If you’d like all optional warnings to be enabled for you (future proof your config!), say B9 instead of B901. You will need Flake8 3.2+ for this feature.

Note that pycodestyle also has a bunch of warnings that are disabled by default. Those get enabled as soon as there is an ignore = line in your configuration. I think this behavior is surprising so Bugbear’s opinionated warnings require explicit selection.

Tests

Just run:

python setup.py test

OMG, this is Python 3 only!

Relax, you can run flake8 with all popular plugins as a tool perfectly fine under Python 3.5+ even if you want to analyze Python 2 code. This way you’ll be able to parse all of the new syntax supported on Python 3 but also effectively all the Python 2 syntax at the same time.

If you’re still invested in Python 2, there might be a small subset of deprecated syntax that you’d have to abandon… but you’re already doing that, right? six or python-future bridge the gaps.

By making the code exclusively Python 3.5+, I’m able to focus on the quality of the checks and re-use all the nice features of the new releases (check out pathlib) instead of wasting cycles on Unicode compatiblity, etc.

License

MIT

Change Log

17.3.0

• introduced B903 (patch contributed by Martijn Pieters)

• bugfix: B902 now enforces cls for instance methods on metaclasses and metacls for class methods on metaclasses

17.2.0

• introduced B902

• bugfix: opinionated warnings no longer invisible in Syntastic

• bugfix: opinionated warnings stay visible when –select on the command-line is used with full three-digit error codes

16.12.2

• bugfix: opinionated warnings no longer get enabled when user specifies ignore = in the configuration. Now they require explicit selection as documented above also in this case.

16.12.1

• bugfix: B007 no longer crashes on tuple unpacking in for-loops

16.12.0

• introduced B007

• bugfix: remove an extra colon in error formatting that was making Bugbear errors invisible in Syntastic

• marked as “Beta” in trove classifiers, it’s been used in production for 8+ months

16.11.1

• introduced B005

• introduced B006

• introduced B950

16.11.0

• bugfix: don’t raise false positives in B901 on closures within generators

• gracefully fail on Python 2 in setup.py

16.10.0

• introduced B004

• introduced B901, thanks Markus!

• update flake8 constraint to at least 3.0.0

16.9.0

• introduced B003

16.7.1

• bugfix: don’t omit message code in B306’s warning

• change dependency on pep8 to dependency on pycodestyle, update flake8 constraint to at least 2.6.2

16.7.0

• introduced B306

16.6.1

• bugfix: don’t crash on files with tuple unpacking in class bodies

16.6.0

• introduced B002, B301, B302, B303, B304, and B305

16.4.2

• packaging herp derp

16.4.1

• bugfix: include tests in the source package (to make setup.py test work for everyone)

• bugfix: explicitly open README.rst in UTF-8 in setup.py for systems with other default encodings

16.4.0

• first published version

• date-versioned

Authors

Glued together by Łukasz Langa. Multiple improvements by Markus Unterwaditzer and Martijn Pieters.