Python 2.x gotchas and landmines

Question

The purpose of my question is to strengthen my knowledge base with Python and get a better picture of it, which includes knowing its faults and surprises. To keep things sp

Answer 1

Due to 'truthiness' this makes sense:

>>>bool(1)
True

but you might not expect it to go the other way:

>>>float(True)
1.0

This can be a gotcha if you're converting strings to numeric and your data has True/False values.