Misleading error message and silent failure with new ROOT 6.22

ROOT
1

The new version of root breaks a few things with strings when the python interface is used. Principally, when using python to do something like this, with say RDataFrame:

for x in dataframe.GetColumnNames():
  if "Jet_" in x:
    print(x)
    print(dataframe.GetColumnType(x))

it will ‘silently fail,’ because the iterable returned now is of type “<class cppyy.gbl.std.string at 0x7504dd0>”. This is probably worse than the other place where this crops up in my own code, which is when constructing a TChain using filenames stored in a ROOT.std.vector. Upon calling .Add(filename), it fails with

TypeError: 'none of the 2 overloaded methods succeeded. Full details:
  int TChain::Add(TChain* chain) =>
 ... =>
    TypeError: could not convert argument 1 (expected string or Unicode object, string found)'

Which is a rather annoying failure message.

The workaround is to call str() on the iterable, but I don’t know if the current behavior is really ideal or acknowledged as a necessary tradeoff, so I’m reporting it here.

Best,
Nick

ROOT Version: 6.22/00
Platform: CentOS 7
Compiler: gcc800
Software Stack: LCG_98

2

Hi,

Yes, this is indeed a backwards-incompatible change, it’s documented here"

(last one)

When iterating over an std::vector of std::string, cppyy now applies an optimization and returns the elements as std::strings, instead of copying them into Python strings by default, as happened before. Unfortunately, if those elements need to be used later as Python strings or used in a conversion that is allowed for Python string (but not for std::string), they need to turned into Python strings first with str() as you pointed out.