[Python-Dev] PEP 332 revival in coordination with pep 349? [ Was:Re: release plan for 2.5 ?] (original) (raw)

Michael Foord fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk
Tue Feb 14 00:53:16 CET 2006

Guido van Rossum wrote:

On 2/13/06, Michael Foord <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:

Phillip J. Eby wrote: [snip..]

In fact, the 'encoding' argument seems useless in the case of str objects, and it seems it should default to latin-1 for unicode objects. The only

-1 for having an implicit encode that behaves differently to other implicit encodes/decodes that happen in Python. Life is confusing enough already. But adding an encoding doesn't help. The str.encode() method always assumes that the string itself is ASCII-encoded, and that's not good enough: Sorry - I meant for the unicode to bytes case. A default encoding that behaves differently to the current to implicit encodes/decodes would be confusing IMHO.

I agree that string to bytes shouldn't change the value of the bytes. The least confusing description of a non-unicode string is 'byte-string'.

Michael Foord

"abc".encode("latin-1")

'abc' "abc".decode("latin-1") u'abc' "abc\xf0".decode("latin-1") u'abc\xf0' "abc\xf0".encode("latin-1") Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ? UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xf0 in position 3: ordinal not in range(128) The right way to look at this is, as Phillip says, to consider conversion between str and bytes as not an encoding but a data type change only. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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