[Python-Dev] Decoding incomplete unicode (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Tue Aug 24 22:38:39 CEST 2004

M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

However, I don't like the way that the patch implements this state handling: I think we should use a generic "state" object here which is passed to the stateful codec and returned together with the standard return values on output:

Why is that better? Practicality beats purity. This is useless over-generalization.

Otherwise we'll end up having different interface signatures for all codecs and extending them to accomodate for future enhancement will become unfeasable without introducing yet another set of APIs.

What is "a codec" here? A class implementing the StreamReader and/or Codec interface? Walter's patch does not change the API of any of these. It just adds a few functions to some module, which are not meant to be called directly.

If we leave out the UTF-7 codec changes in the patch, the only state that the UTF-8 and UTF-16 codecs create is the number of bytes consumed. We already have the required state parameter for this in the standard decode API, so no extra APIs are needed for these two codecs.

Where precisely is the number of decoded bytes in the API?

Regards, Martin

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