Ant's pedantic Python Copilot instructions

copilot-instructions.md

Python Rules

• Where possible, prefer duck-typing tests than isinstance, e.g. hasattr(x, attr) not isinstance(x, SpecificClass)
• Use modern Python 3.9+ syntax
• Prefer f-strings for formatting strings rather than .format or % formatting
• When creating log statements, never use runtime string formatting. Use the extra argument and % placeholders in the log message
• When generating union types, use the union operator, | , not the typing.Union type
• When merging dictionaries, use the union operator
• When writing type hints for standard generics like dict, list, tuple, use the PEP-585 spec, not typing.Dict, typing.List, etc.
• Use type annotations in function and method signatures, unless the rest of the code base does not have type signatures
• Do not add inline type annotations for local variables when they are declared and assigned in the same statement.
• Prefer pathlib over os.path for operations like path joining
• When using open() in text-mode, explicitly set encoding to utf-8
• Prefer argparse over optparse
• Use the builtin methods in the itertools module for common tasks on iterables rather than creating code to achieve the same result
• When creating dummy data, don't use "Foo" and "Bar", be more creative
• When creating dummy data in strings like names don't just create English data, create data in a range of languages like English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Hindi
• When asked to create a function, class, or other piece of standalone code, don't append example calls unless otherwise told to