[Python-Dev] bytes type (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Tue Oct 4 02:37:42 CEST 2005

Le lundi 03 octobre 2005 à 14:02 -0700, Guido van Rossum a écrit :

On 10/3/05, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote: > Could the "bytes" type be just the same as the current "str" type but > without the implicit unicode conversion ? Or am I missing some desired > functionality ?

No. It will be a mutable array of bytes. It will intentionally resemble strings as little as possible. There won't be a literal for it.

Thinking about it, it may have to offer the search and replace facilities offered by strings (including regular expressions).

Here is an use case : say I'm reading an HTML file (or receiving it over the network). Since the character encoding can be specified in the HTML file itself (in the ...), I must first receive it as a bytes object. But then I must fetch the encoding information from the HTML header: therefore I must use some string ops on the bytes object to parse this information. Only after I have discovered the encoding, can I finally convert the bytes object to a text string.

Or would there be another way to do it?

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