PyCQA / PyCQA/pyflakes

Check for invalid format specifiers

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Python
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Description

pyflakes does some format specifier checks (https://github.com/PyCQA/pyflakes/pull/443), but it isn't able to detect invalid format specifiers. For example

f"{x:f.1}"
"{x:f.1}".format(x=1)

are both wrong (the f is supposed to go after the .1). Also the f-string one is a ValueError and is only checked at runtime.

The format specification mini-language is pretty complicated, so this would be useful, but also maybe not easy to implement. For .format strings you can use https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html#string.Formatter.parse, but for f-strings, there's nothing in the standard library that can tokenize the f-string components (it would be useful if there were). Libraries like pygments and parso can tokenize them, or maybe the tokenizer added in https://github.com/PyCQA/pyflakes/pull/443 can be extended to handle them.

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
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Research direction

Start by reviewing the tokenizer added in PyCQA/pyflakes#443 and Python's string.Formatter.parse documentation for .format strings. Compare that approach with the f-string tokenization options mentioned, including pygments and parso. Done means invalid format specifiers such as f.1 are detected in both .format strings and f-strings.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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