Using locals() and format() method for strings: are there any caveats?

Question

Are there any disadvantages, caveats or bad practice warnings about using the following pattern?

def buildString(user, name = 'john', age=22):
    userId = user.getUserId()
    return "Name: {name}, age: {age}, userid:{userId}".format(**locals())

I had a very repetitive string generation code to write and was tempted to use this, but something about using locals() makes me uncomfortable. Is there any danger of unexpected behavior in this?

Edit: context

I found myself constantly writing stuff like:

"{name} {age} {userId} {etc}...".format(name=name, age=age, userId=userId, etc=etc)

Answer 1

There is now an official way to do this, as of Python 3.6.0: formatted string literals.

It works like this:

f'normal string text {local_variable_name}'

E.g. instead of these:

"hello %(name) you are %(age) years old" % locals()
"hello {name} you are {age} years old".format(**locals())
"hello {name} you are {age} years old".format(name=name, age=age)

just do this:

f"hello {name} you are {age} years old"

Here's the official example:

>>> name = "Fred"
>>> f"He said his name is {name}."
'He said his name is Fred.'
>>> width = 10
>>> precision = 4
>>> value = decimal.Decimal("12.34567")
>>> f"result: {value:{width}.{precision}}"  # nested fields
'result:      12.35'

Reference:

• Python 3.6 What's New
• PEP 498
• Lexical analysis description

Answer 2

If the format string is not user-supplied, this usage is okay.

format is preferred over using the old % for string substitution.
locals is built-in to Python and its behavior will be reliable.

I think locals does exactly what you need.
Just don't modify the dictionary from locals and I would say you have a pretty good solution.

If the format string is user-supplied, you are susceptible to injection attacks of all sorts of badness.

Answer 3

Pre Python 3.6 answer

This is very old, but if you find yourself using .format the one caveat I have encountered with passing in **locals is that if you don't have that variable defined anywhere, it will break. Explicitly stating what variables are passed in will avoid this in most modern IDEs.

foo = "bar"
"{foo} and {baz} are pair programming".format(**locals())
<exception occurs>