[Python-3000] PEP 3138- String representation in Python 3000 (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Thu May 15 12:38:11 CEST 2008

On 2008-05-15 12:06, Paul Moore wrote:

On 15/05/2008, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

Consider code that gets an encoding passed in as a variable e. It knows it has a bytes instance b. To encode b from bytes to str (unicode), it can use s = b.decode(e). To encode, you use .decode? It's nice to know it's not just me who has trouble keeping the terminology straight...

It's all a matter of perspective. You can say you're encoding Latin-1 to Unicode, or you can say your encoding Unicode to Latin-1.

Python's Unicode implementation regards PyUnicode as the "bigger" type than PyString (*), since it can hold all possible code points, so when going from the "bigger" type to the smaller one, you encode, whereas when going from the smaller one to the bigger one, you decode.

For codecs in general, you have a source and a destination defining the codec (= coding / decoding). When going from the source to the destination you encode, the other way around is decoding.

(*) This is why coercion in Py2 goes from PyString to PyUnicode and not the other way around.

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