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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Oct 4 02:42:49 CEST 2005

This would presumaby support the (read-only part of the) buffer API so search would be covered.

I don't see a use case for replace.

Alternatively, you could always specify Latin-1 as the encoding and convert it that way -- I don't think there's any input that can cause Latin-1 decoding to fail.

On 10/3/05, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

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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-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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