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<p>You are here: <a href=index.html>Home</a> <span class=u>&#8227;</span> <a href=table-of-contents.html#whats-new>Dive Into Python 3</a> <span class=u>&#8227;</span>
<h1>What&#8217;s New In &#8220;Dive Into Python 3&#8221;</h1>
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<p><span class=u>&#x275D;</span> Isn&#8217;t this where we came in? <span class=u>&#x275E;</span><br>&mdash; Pink Floyd, The Wall
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<p id=toc>&nbsp;
<h2 id=divingin><i>a.k.a.</i> &#8220;the minus level&#8221;</h2>
<p class=f>You read the original &#8220;<a href=http://diveintopython.org/>Dive Into Python</a>&#8221; and maybe even bought it on paper. (Thanks!) You already know Python 2 pretty well. You&#8217;re ready to take the plunge into Python 3. &hellip; If all of that is true, read on. (If none of that is true, you&#8217;d be better off <a href=your-first-python-program.html>starting at the beginning</a>.)
<p>Python 3 comes with a script called <code>2to3</code>. Learn it. Love it. Use it. <a href=porting-code-to-python-3-with-2to3.html>Porting Code to Python 3 with <code>2to3</code></a> is a reference of all the things that the <code>2to3</code> tool can fix automatically. Since a lot of those things are syntax changes, it&#8217;s a good starting point to learn about a lot of the syntax changes in Python 3. (<code>print</code> is now a function, <code>`x`</code> doesn&#8217;t work, <i class=baa>&amp;</i>c.)
<p><a href=case-study-porting-chardet-to-python-3.html>Case Study: Porting <code>chardet</code> to Python 3</a> documents my (ultimately successful) effort to port a non-trivial library from Python 2 to Python 3. It may help you; it may not. There&#8217;s a fairly steep learning curve, since you need to kind of understand the library first, so you can understand why it broke and how I fixed it. A lot of the breakage centers around strings. Speaking of which&hellip;
<p>Strings. Whew. Where to start. Python 2 had &#8220;strings&#8221; and &#8220;Unicode strings.&#8221; Python 3 has &#8220;bytes&#8221; and &#8220;strings.&#8221; That is, all strings are now Unicode strings, and if you want to deal with a bag of bytes, you use the new <code>bytes</code> type. Oh, and Python 3 will never implicitly convert between strings and bytes, so if you&#8217;re not sure which one you have, your code will almost certainly break. Read <a href=strings.html>the Strings chapter</a> for more details.
<p>Even if you don&#8217;t care about Unicode, you&#8217;ll want to read about <a href=strings.html#formatting-strings>string formatting in Python 3</a>, which is completely different from Python 2.
<p>Iterators are everywhere in Python 3, and I understand them a lot better than I did five years ago when I wrote &#8220;Dive Into Python&#8221;. You need to understand them too, because lots of functions that used to return lists in Python 2 will now return iterators in Python 3. At a minimum, you should read <a href=iterators.html#a-fibonacci-iterator>the second half of the Iterators chapter</a> and <a href=advanced-iterators.html#generator-expressions>the second half of the Advanced Iterators chapter</a>.
<p>By popular request, I&#8217;ve added an appendix on <a href=special-method-names.html>Special Method Names</a>, which is kind of like <a href=http://www.python.org/doc/3.0/reference/datamodel.html#special-method-names>the Python docs &#8220;Data Model&#8221; chapter</a> but with more snark.
<p>When I was writing &#8220;Dive Into Python&#8221;, all of the available XML libraries sucked. Then Fredrik Lundh wrote <a href=http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm>ElementTree</a>, which doesn&#8217;t suck at all. The Python gods wisely <a href=http://docs.python.org/3.0/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html>incorporated ElementTree into the standard library</a>, and now it forms the basis for <a href=xml.html>my new XML chapter</a>. The old ways of parsing XML are still around, but you should avoid them, because they suck!
<p>That&#8217;s it for now; the book&#8217;s not finished yet! The file I/O subsystem is totally different now; I hope to write about that soon.
<p class=c>&copy; 2001&ndash;9 <a href=about.html>Mark Pilgrim</a>