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Configuration parsing: "digits + underline" should be considered as a string #862
Description
When parsing configurations (such as name=123_456), maybe the digits + underline should be considered as a string? Now the underline will be ignored and the remaining digits are treated as an integer.
Example (main.py):
from sacred import Experiment
ex = Experiment("Exp")
@ex.config
def config():
name = "abc"
@ex.automain
def main(_config):
print(_config['name'], type(_config['name']))- For
python main.py, we getabc <class 'str'>. - For
python main.py with name=123_456, we get123456 <class 'int'>, which is quite wired.
A simple solution is to run the script with python main.py with name='"123_456"', but the command is a little messy and not intuitive.
Activity
thequilo commentedon Feb 23, 2022
Hi @Jarvis73!
Sacred treats the arguments of configuration values as python literals (and treats everything it can't handle as a string), and what you see is actually just the way that python interprets numbers. I actually like the idea to just treat everything as python literal because it seems intuitive (to me, at least). But, I agree that we can come up with weird things:
python main.py with name=0xdeef, we get57071 <class 'int'>python main.py with name=1j, we get aTypeError(because JSON apparently can't serialize complex numbers?)python main.py with name=1e-1, we get0.1 <class 'float'>. Obvious, but I really wouldn't expect that when seeingname=1e-1python main.py with name=['a']we get[a] <class 'str'>, andpython main.py with name=["'a'"], we get['a'] <class 'sacred.config.custom_containers.ReadOnlyList'>This list could probably go on for a while, and after writing it down, I start to feel that it is actually not that intuitive. But, this list also shows that if we start to have exceptions to the "treat it as a literal" rule, we'll end up with many of them.
Jarvis73 commentedon Feb 24, 2022
Hi @thequilo!
Thanks for the detailed explanation. Now I can understand the design purpose, and maybe it is more reasonable, in spite that we have to use
'"xxx"'in some cases.