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Comment by unsnap_biceps | Hacker News Reader

This is super exciting but I wish they added a function to render the template to a string rather then having everyone write their own version of basic rendering.

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One place we landed with PEP 750 is that Template instances have no natural string rendering.

That is, you must process a Template in some way to get a useful string out the other side. This is why Template.__str__() is spec'd to be the same as Template.__repr__().

If you want to render a Template like an f-string for some reason, the pep750 examples repo contains an implementation of an `f(template: Template) -> str` method: https://github.com/davepeck/pep750-examples/blob/main/pep/fs...

This could be revisited, for instance to add `Template.format()` in the future.

I totally agree with `Template.__str__()` == `Template.__repr__()`, but I would strongly be for adding a `Template.format()`. I expect that over time I'll be passed template strings where I expected normal strings and adding that example `f(template: Template)` everywhere to my code bases is just a lot of repeated code for no real value.

That said, I think this is a great bit of work and I look forward to getting to use it! Thank you!

> and adding that example `f(template: Template)` everywhere to my code bases is just a lot of repeated code for no real value.

I'd agree that it should be somewhere within the library, even if it's just a separate top-level function in the described `string.templatelib`. If it isn't, I'm sure someone will make a PyPI package for it right away.

PEP 501 allowed `.format()` to do this, but discussions on PEP 750 felt that format shouldn't be needed, because when you need a basic format, you should probably just use f-strings. But maybe `__format__` can be added in in a future version of python if this is really wanted.

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