Docstring of array.array misses 'w' type info and mentions wide/narrow builds

[FRex]

Documentation

The docstring of array.array at

cpython/Modules/arraymodule.c

Line 2912 in cfcd524

narrow builds this is 2-bytes on wide builds this is 4-bytes.\n\

has a few mistakes:

1. in description of 'u' type it mentions the narrow/wide build split that is not a thing since 3.3 - https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.3.html#functionality
2. it doesn't mention that since 3.3 the 'u' type is deprecated and 'w' should be used.
3. it doesn't mention that 'u' type since 3.9 corresponds to wchar_t of C compiler used (so usually 2 byte UTF-16 on Windows, 4 byte UTF-32 elsewhere), instead of to narrow/wide Python build.
4. it doesn't mention the newer 'w' type that is Python's own Py_UCS4 4 byte UTF-32.

The documentation at https://docs.python.org/3/library/array.html doesn't have these issues, only the docstring (that is shown in help(array.array) in the REPL) does. This is a mismatch between documentation and docstring.

Linked PRs

• gh-142083: Clarify documentation for array('u') typecode #142323