apparently equal strings are not equal in Python

Question

I am writing a prepush githook using GitPython.

Here is a snippet of code:

local_ref, local_sha1, remote_ref, remote_sha1 = [line for line in sys.stdin][0].split(' ')

for i, commit in enumerate(repo.iter_commits('docs-and-config')):

    print("remote_sha1 is {}\n".format(remote_sha1), "commit.hexsha is {}\n".format(commit.hexsha))
    print(type(remote_sha1), type(commit.hexsha))
    print(commit.hexsha == remote_sha1)
    if commit.hexsha == remote_sha1:
        remote_commit = commit
    if i > 10:
        break

Here is the result of the first three iterations:

 remote_sha1 is 9c5e0c813f8ac8bf95997911c7845aec935f1d43

 commit.hexsha is ad0632a1e17c03d65124154a7f1f8d7c23966fbf

<class 'str'> <class 'str'>
False



remote_sha1 is 9c5e0c813f8ac8bf95997911c7845aec935f1d43

 commit.hexsha is e63f31ba923dca63917c1ed3a9d332f9c42baf83

<class 'str'> <class 'str'>
False



remote_sha1 is 9c5e0c813f8ac8bf95997911c7845aec935f1d43

 commit.hexsha is 9c5e0c813f8ac8bf95997911c7845aec935f1d43

<class 'str'> <class 'str'>
False

Why is the third instance not equal? I've tried stripping whitespace from both strings; that makes no difference.

Answer 1

Apparently you have an extra \n char in the strings you are parsing from stdin. Try to do : remote_sha1 = remote_sha1.strip() in the beginning of your for loop.

Also, if you use !r as a rendering type when calling str.format, Python wll put ' around your strings, so you will be aware of whitespace there:

print("remote_sha1 is {!r}\n".format(remote_sha1), "commit.hexsha is {!r}\n".format(commit.hexsha))