Message 76199 - Python tracker (original) (raw)

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 11:01, Skip Montanaro <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:

Skip Montanaro <skip@pobox.com> added the comment:

One doc nit: There is still reference to gdbm and Dbm (or dbm) objects when they should probably use dbm.gnu and dbm.ndbm, respectively.

OK, I will fix that and upload a new patch at some point.

I'm confused by the encoding="Latin-1" args to _io.open for dbm.dumb. I thought the default enoding was going to be utf-8, and I see no way to influence that. Is that just to make sure all code points can be written without error?

It's so that when writing out there won't be any errors. Since the repr of strings are used instead of bytes the stuff passed in and written to disk must be represented in an encoding that will never complain about what bytes it gets. Latin-1 does this while UTF-8. And since everything is being written and read in Latin-1 I figured I might as well be thorough and specify the encoding.