Skip to content

Warn about certain sequences of chained comparisons #690

@JelleZijlstra

Description

@JelleZijlstra

I was pointed to this buggy line:

  if x is None != y is None:

(For context, Python allows chaining any of the comparison operators ==, !=, is, is not, >, >=, <, <=, in, not in. a OP b OP c is equivalent to a OP b and b OP c except that b is only evaluated once.)

I find it hard to imagine a use case for combining is and != in the same chained comparison, so it would be useful for linters to warn about this and similar patterns.

In my company's internal linter, I implemented a check that disallows all chained comparison pairs except == + ==, is + is, </<= + </<=, and >/>= + >/>=.

It found one false positive where someone had intentionally written == + !=, but I'd argue it's clearer with and:

-                        value.fullName == existing.fullName != "*"
+                        (value.fullName == existing.fullName and value.fullName != "*")

Would pyflakes be interested in a similar check?

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions