[Python-Dev] Need a way to test for 8-bit-or-unicode-string (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.one@home.com
Mon, 8 Oct 2001 03:54:59 -0400

[Guido]

... [*] For a while I toyed with the idea of calling the abstract base class 'string', and hacking import so that sys.modules['string'] is the string class. The abstract base class should then have methods that invoke the concrete implementations, so that string.split(s) would be the same as s.split(). ... Unfortunately this broke down when I realized that the signature of string.join() is wrong for the string module: the string.join function is string.join(sequence, stringobject) while the signature of the string method is join(stringobject, sequence). ... (Hm, it could be saved by making string.join() accept the arguments in either order. Gross. :-)

Luckily, it's also hopeless:

string.join('abc', ' - ') 'a - b - c'

That is, since strings are also sequences, there's no way to disambiguate the pass-2-strings case. Although, if you ask me, it's obvious I wanted the result shown instead of ' abc-abc ' .