On my Windows 10 laptop, I have a python 2 Django code base running on my python 3 environment setup. Recently I had to switch it over to a python 2 environment because of some python 2 specific libraries.
But we intend on migrating the small site from 2 to 3 in the near future.
So instead of deleting my environment for python 3, I created an environment for python 2 and am using them both in separate terminals.
Advisable to do this or not ?
import sys
py_version = sys.version_info[0]
if py_version == 2:
from urllib2 import urlopen
else:
from urllib.request import urlopen
response = urlopen('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users')
json = response.read()
# print(json) # do something with json
response.close()
Advisable would have been to drop Python 2 three years ago when its end-of-life was looming
Otherwise, supporting both Python 2 and 3 in the same codebase was a common thing for several years. The usual way to do it was not to explicitly check the version number, but instead use exception handling to check for Python 3 and fall back to Python 2. Your example using that scheme would look like:
try:
from urllib.request import urlopen
except ImportError:
from urllib2 import urlopen
response = urlopen('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users')
json = response.read()
# print(json) # do something with json
response.close()
When you’re ready to drop Python 2, just remove the try/except and continue on your merry way
