[Python-Dev] methods on the bytes object (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sun Apr 30 17:22:14 CEST 2006

On 4/30/06, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

Josiah Carlson wrote: > Specifically in the case of bytes.join(), the current common use-case of > .join(...) would become something similar to > bytes().join(...), unless bytes objects got a syntax... Or > maybe I'm missing something?

I think what you are missing is that algorithms that currently operate on byte strings should be reformulated to operate on character strings, not reformulated to operate on bytes objects.

Well, yes, in most cases, but while attempting to write an I/O library I already had the urge to collect "chunks" I've read in a list and join them later, instead of concatenating repeatedly. I guess I should suppress this urge, and plan to optimize extending a bytes arrays instead, along the lines of how we optimize lists.

Still, I expect that having a bunch of string-ish methods on bytes arrays would be convenient for certain types of data handling. Of course, only those methods that don't care about character types would be added, but that's a long list: startswith, endswith, index, rindex, find, rfind, split, rsplit, join, count, replace, translate. (I'm skipping center, ljust and rjust since they seem exclusive to text processing. Ditto for strip/lstrip/rstrip although an argument for those could probably be made, with mandatory 2nd arg.)

Unhelpfully y'rs,

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

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