Append! to an Int array with string (bug?)

New to Julia
1

I was messing around in the REPL with append! and noticed the following behavior:

julia> a1 = [1,2,3]
3-element Array{Int64,1}:
 1
 2
 3

julia> append!(a1, "AAAA")
7-element Array{Int64,1}:
  1
  2
  3
 65
 65
 65
 65

While I understand what is going on here (the string “AAAA” is being treated as an array of Char like in C), is this the expected behavior for Julia? I would’ve expected to either get an error because of incompatible types or promotion of the a1 array to Any, but I wasn’t expecting that the string would be treated as an array of chars.

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2 
julia> @edit append!(a1, "AAAA")

shows that it is calling the append! method for an iterable, and indeed iterating through a String does the following:

julia> for i in "AAAA"
       @show i, typeof(i)
       end
(i, typeof(i)) = ('A', Char)
(i, typeof(i)) = ('A', Char)
(i, typeof(i)) = ('A', Char)
(i, typeof(i)) = ('A', Char)
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3

Thanks for confirming the behavior. My real question is whether it should behave this way? Do we treat strings as Arrays of Chars elsewhere?

4

That string isn’t treated as an Array{Char} there, but as any iterable:

append!([1,2,3], ('a' for i in 1:3))
5

It is a little surprising to me that a Char gets automatically converted to an Int here. This seems potentially dangerous in this particular case, though I haven’t thought through the broader implications of this.

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6

Sorry for the mistake in nomenclature, but @ExpandingMan is getting at my surprise/question. Have the iterable be decomposed into Chars, and the Chars converted into Int to work with the main array seems odd (rather than having an error).

7

This is pretty unfortunate but I think it’s a fairly unavoidable consequence of strings being iterable sequences of characters and the fact that Char is convertible to Int. However, @jeff.bezanson is working on a change for 0.7/1.0 which will allow Int('x') to work while convert(Int, c::Char) need not be allowed, which would fix this issue.

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