Question

I am writing a Django application, and I often use the Python backtick operator to convert integers to strings.

Recently, I found that a form in my application was broken. After rewriting several backticks into str(), the application was fixed.

Specifically, where course is an object, I changed

“course.id \

into str(course.id) to fix the application.

When does the backtick operator work, and when does it not?

Answer 1

Backticks are an alias for repr(), not for str(). There are types where repr() and str() return the same value, hence the confusion.

For user output, you should always use str(). Backticks probably shouldn’t be used at all — they have been removed in Python 3.x since they were considered a misfeature.