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Usage of ast.

Jon Ribbens jon+usenet at unequivocal.eu
Mon Feb 27 09:18:29 EST 2017 
On 2017-02-27, Vincent Vande Vyvre <vincent.vande.vyvre at telenet.be> wrote:
> Le 27/02/17 à 14:09, Chris Angelico a écrit :
>> The message is a little confusing, but the error comes from the fact
>> that literal_eval permits a very few legal operations, and calling a
>> function isn't one of them. So when you try to evaluate the "literal"
>> that you've given it, you get back an error saying that a Call is
>> 'malformed'. More accurate would be to say that it's not permitted.
>
> OK, it's coherent with the secure execution.

"execution" isn't really the right way to describe literal_eval().
It isn't an code executor or even an expression evaluator, all it
does is turns a Python literal in source form into the value that
source represents. You can't do literal_eval("2*3") for example,
because that's an expression not a literal.

The only reason you can do literal_eval("2+3") (in Python>=3.2)
is because of a side effect of the fact that complex number literals
are, well, complex ("2+3j"), and the support for +/- wasn't restricted
to complex literals only.
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