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POWhy should I convert all strings to constants in Python?
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  1. POWhy should I convert all strings to constants in Python?
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    copied!<p>I don't know if this will be useful to the community or not, as it might be unique to my situation. I'm working with a senior programmer who, in his code, has this peculiar habit of turning all strings into constants before using them. And I just don't get why. It doesn't make any sense to me. 99% of the time, we are gaining no abstraction or expressive power from the conversion, as it's done like this:</p> <pre><code>URL_CONVERTER = "url_converter" URL_TYPE_LONG = "url_type_long" URL_TYPE_SHORT = "url_type_short" URL_TYPE_ARRAY = [URL_TYPE_LONG, URL_TYPE_SHORT] for urltype in URL_TYPE_ARRAY: outside_class.validate(urltype) </code></pre> <p>Just like that. As a rule, the constant name is almost always simply the string's content, capitalized, and these constants are seldom referenced more than once anyway. Perhaps less than 5% of the constants thus created are referenced twice or more during runtime.</p> <p>Is this some programming technique that I just don't understand? Or is it just a bad habit? The other programmers are beginning to mimic this (possibly bad) form, and I want to know if there is a reason for me to as well before blindly following.</p> <p>Thanks!</p> <p>Edit: Updated the example. In addition, I understand everyone's points, and would add that this is a fairly small shop, at most two other people will ever see anyone's code, never mind work on it, and these are pretty simple one-offs we're building, not complicated workers or anything. I understand why this would be good practice in a large project, but in the context of our work, it comes across as too much overhead for a very simple task.</p>
 

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