when dealing with unicode strings, isinstance(u, basestring) will return True for either bytestrings or unicode strings. So, in order to allow unicode in the matplotlibrc, we need to use this typechecking rather than the former (which was type(s) is string )

katyhuff · katyhuff · commit b300ef34ec0e · 2013-06-29T10:04:23.000-05:00
diff --git a/lib/matplotlib/rcsetup.py b/lib/matplotlib/rcsetup.py
@@ -72,7 +72,7 @@ def validate_path_exists(s):
 
 def validate_bool(b):
     """Convert b to a boolean or raise"""
-    if type(b) is str:
+    if isinstance(b, basestring):
         b = b.lower()
     if b in ('t', 'y', 'yes', 'on', 'true', '1', 1, True):
         return True
@@ -83,8 +83,8 @@ def validate_bool(b):
 
 
 def validate_bool_maybe_none(b):
-    'Convert b to a boolean or raise'
-    if type(b) is str:
+    """Convert b to a boolean, None, or raise"""
+    if isinstance(b, basestring):
         b = b.lower()
     if b == 'none':
         return None
@@ -179,7 +179,7 @@ def __init__(self, n):
 
     def __call__(self, s):
         """return a seq of n floats or raise"""
-        if type(s) is str:
+        if isinstance(s, basestring):
             ss = s.split(',')
             if len(ss) != self.n:
                 raise ValueError(
@@ -202,7 +202,7 @@ def __init__(self, n):
 
     def __call__(self, s):
         """return a seq of n ints or raise"""
-        if type(s) is str:
+        if isinstance(s, basestring):
             ss = s.split(',')
             if len(ss) != self.n:
                 raise ValueError(
@@ -254,7 +254,7 @@ def validate_color(s):
 
 def validate_colorlist(s):
     'return a list of colorspecs'
-    if type(s) is str:
+    if isinstance(s, basestring):
         return [validate_color(c.strip()) for c in s.split(',')]
     else:
         assert type(s) in [list, tuple]
@@ -263,7 +263,7 @@ def validate_colorlist(s):
 
 def validate_stringlist(s):
     'return a list'
-    if type(s) in (str, unicode):
+    if isinstance(s, basestring):
         return [v.strip() for v in s.split(',')]
     else:
         assert type(s) in [list, tuple]
@@ -284,7 +284,7 @@ def validate_aspect(s):
 
 
 def validate_fontsize(s):
-    if type(s) is str:
+    if isinstance(s, basestring):
         s = s.lower()
     if s in ['xx-small', 'x-small', 'small', 'medium', 'large', 'x-large',
              'xx-large', 'smaller', 'larger']:
@@ -337,7 +337,7 @@ def update_savefig_format(value):
 
 
 def validate_ps_distiller(s):
-    if type(s) is str:
+    if isinstance(s, basestring):
         s = s.lower()
 
     if s in ('none', None):
@@ -423,7 +423,7 @@ def validate_hinting(s):
 
 
 def validate_bbox(s):
-    if type(s) is str:
+    if isinstance(s, basestring):
         s = s.lower()
         if s == 'tight':
             return s
