Skip to content

Fix typing.TYPE_CHECKING docs to reflect PEP 649. #134813

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
Merged
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
32 changes: 18 additions & 14 deletions Doc/library/typing.rst
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -3530,28 +3530,32 @@ Constant
.. data:: TYPE_CHECKING

A special constant that is assumed to be ``True`` by 3rd party static
type checkers. It is ``False`` at runtime.
type checkers. It's ``False`` at runtime.

A module which is expensive to import, and which only contain types
used for typing annotations, can be safely imported inside an
``if TYPE_CHECKING:`` block. This prevents the module from actually
being imported at runtime; annotations aren't eagerly evaluated
(see :pep:`649`) so using undefined symbols in annotations is
harmless--as long as you don't later examine them.
Your static type analysis tool will set ``TYPE_CHECKING`` to
``True`` during static type analysis, which means the module will
be imported and the types will be checked properly during such analysis.

Usage::

if TYPE_CHECKING:
import expensive_mod

def fun(arg: 'expensive_mod.SomeType') -> None:
def fun(arg: expensive_mod.SomeType) -> None:
local_var: expensive_mod.AnotherType = other_fun()

The first type annotation must be enclosed in quotes, making it a
"forward reference", to hide the ``expensive_mod`` reference from the
interpreter runtime. Type annotations for local variables are not
evaluated, so the second annotation does not need to be enclosed in quotes.

.. note::

If ``from __future__ import annotations`` is used,
annotations are not evaluated at function definition time.
Instead, they are stored as strings in ``__annotations__``.
This makes it unnecessary to use quotes around the annotation
(see :pep:`563`).
If you occasionally need to examine type annotations at runtime
which may contain undefined symbols, use
:meth:`annotationlib.get_annotations` with a ``format`` parameter
of :attr:`annotationlib.Format.STRING` or
:attr:`annotationlib.Format.FORWARDREF` to safely retrieve the
annotations without raising :exc:`NameError`.

.. versionadded:: 3.5.2

Expand Down
Loading