[Python-Dev] unifying str and unicode (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Mon Oct 3 23:28:46 CEST 2005


Antoine Pitrou wrote:

To which you apparently didn't read my answer, that is: you can never be sure that a variable containing something which is /semantically/ textual (*) will never contain anything other than ASCII text.

That is simply not true. There are variables that is semantically textual, yet I can be sure that this is a byte string only if it consists just of ASCII.

For example, if you invoke a Tkinter function, it will return a byte string if the result is purely ASCII, else return a Unicode string. This is an interface guarantee, hence I can be sure.

Regards, Martin



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