I'm looking at an output from 2to3 that includes this change:
- for file_prefix in output.keys():
+ for file_prefix in list(output.keys()):
where output is a dictionary.
What is the significance of this change? Why does 2to3 do this?
How does this change make the code Python 3 compatible?
In Python 3, the .keys() method returns a view object rather than a list, for efficiency's sake.
In the iteration case, this doesn't actually matter, but where it would matter is if you were doing something like foo.keys()[0] - you can't index a view. Thus, 2to3 always adds an explicit list conversion to make sure that any potential indexing doesn't break.
You can manually remove the list() call anywhere that a view would work fine; 2to3 just isn't smart enough to tell which case is which.
(Note that the 2.x version could call iterkeys() instead, since it's not indexing.)