[Python-3000] PyString C API (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sat Aug 26 01:32:48 CEST 2006

On 8/25/06, Fredrik Lundh <fredrik at pythonware.com> wrote:

> the fact that it's impossible to offer a view subtype that's com- > patible with the current PyString C API might be an issue, though.

what's the current thinking wrt. the PyString C API, btw. has any of the various bytes/wide string design proposals looked at the C API level ?

No... I was hoping to get to that but ended up spending unanticipated time on fixing comparisons. Maybe the first step ought to be similar to what was done for int/long unification -- keep both the PyString_ and PyUnicode_ APIs around but make the PyString_ APIs do whatever they do on Unicode objects instead. Each use of certain macros will still have to be patched, obviously; e.g. a common way to create a string is to call PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, nbytes) and then to call something like memcpy(PyString_AS_STRING(obj), source, nbytes) -- this won't work of course.

There are a bunch of PyBytes_ APIs that can be used in those places where 8-bit strings are really used to hold binary data, not characters. These have been modeled on the PyString APIs (even with AS_STRING and GET_SIZE macros). See Include/bytesobject.h.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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