[Python-Dev] Bug or feature? Unicode vs t# (original) (raw)

Martin v. Loewis martin@loewis.home.cs.tu-berlin.de
Thu, 11 Oct 2001 10:25:28 +0200

So change the docs. hexlify() hasn't changed, yet the result has. So long as Unicode objects support the buffer interface, the question is why they've changed how they respond to that interface.

Unicode objects haven't changed in their response to the buffer interface. What has changed is how t# uses this interface.

AFAICT, the change has occured in version 2.59 of getargs.c, in response to patch #426072. In 2.1.1, t# used to call the getcharbuffer operation, now it calls the getreadbuffer function.

For Unicode objects, these are different: getcharbuffer converts the string using the default encoding into a character string, whereas getreadbuffer returns a pointer to the internal representation (depending on the platform, this makes 2 or 4 bytes per Unicode character, and they may come out either little or big endian).

It seems that the problem is in the simplification attempted with said patch.

Regards, Martin