Support for QVariant

PyQt4 implements two APIs for QVariant. v1 (the default for Python v2) exposes the QVariant class to Python and requires applications to explicitly convert a QVariant to the actual value. v2 (the default for Python v3) does not expose the QVariant class to Python and automatically converts a QVariant to the actual value. While this is usually the best thing to do, it does raise problems of its own:

• Information is lost when converting between a C++ QVariant and the corresponding Python object. For example a QVariant distinguishes between signed and unsigned integers but Python doesn’t. Normally this doesn’t matter but some applications may need to make the distinction.
• There is no obvious way to represent a null QVariant as a standard Python object. PyQt4 introduced the QPyNullVariant class to address this problem.

Multiple APIs are intended to help manage an application’s use of an old API to a newer, incompatible API. They cannot be used to temporarily change the behaviour - modules that rely on different API versions cannot be used in the same application.

In PyQt5 the implementation of QVariant is different to those of PyQt4. By default the behaviour is the same as PyQt4’s v2 API. However it is possible to temporarily suppress the automatic conversion of a C++ QVariant to a Python object and to return a wrapped Python QVariant instead - behaviour similar to PyQt4’s v1 API - by calling the sip.enableautoconversion() function.

The actual value of a wrapped Python QVariant is obtained by calling its value() method. (Note that in PyQt4’s v1 API this method is called toPyObject().)

PyQt5 does not support the QPyNullVariant class as it is no longer needed.