Coding guidelines

Style

All the code must follow PEP 8. You can use Flake8 to check for compliance. Flake8 is installed by default to all server environments, via MoPyTools.

Flake8 provides a Mercurial hook, to perform a code check on every commit or qrefresh. Here’s an example of Mercurial ~/.hgrc file:

[hooks]
commit = python:flake8.run.hg_hook
qrefresh = python:flake8.run.hg_hook

[flake8]
strict = 0

If strict option is set to 1, any warning will block the commit. When strict is set to 0, warnings are just displayed in the standard output.

Read these:

• Flake8 documentation: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/flake8
• PEP 8 - The official style guideline: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008

Unicode vs Str

All internal strings in our server applications must use the unicode type unless stated otherwise.

Exceptions are:

• Rendered e-mails
• LDAP or SQL specific values

When the str type is used, the utf-8 encoding must be used:

>>> uni = u'Café'
>>> uni
u'Caf\xe9'
>>> uni.encode('utf-8')
'Caf\xc3\xa9'
>>> print uni.encode('utf-8')
Café
>>> print uni
Café

More on Unicode : http://docs.python.org/howto/unicode.html