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

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Sun Apr 30 20:30:05 CEST 2006

"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.

By "character strings" can I assume you mean unicode strings which contain data, and not some new "character string" type? I know I must have missed some conversation. I was under the impression that in Py3k:

Python 1.x and 2.x str -> mutable bytes object Python 2.x unicode -> str

I was also under the impression that str.encode(...) -> bytes, bytes.decode(...) -> str, and that there would be some magical argument to pass to the file or open open(fn, 'rb', magical_parameter).read() -> bytes.

I mention this because I do binary data handling, some ''.join(...) for IO buffers as Guido mentioned (because it is the fastest string concatenation available in Python 2.x), and from this particular conversation, it seems as though Python 3.x is going to lose some expressiveness and power.

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