[Python-Dev] Readability of hex strings (Was: Use of coding cookie in 3.x stdlib) (original) (raw)

Alexandre Vassalotti alexandre at peadrop.com
Mon Jul 26 20:42:07 CEST 2010

[+Python-ideas -Python-Dev]

import binascii def h(s): return binascii.unhexlify("".join(s.split()))

h("DE AD BE EF CA FE BA BE")

-- Alexandre

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 11:29 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:

I find "\xXX\xXX\xXX\xXX..." notation for binary data totally unreadable. Everybody who uses and analyses binary data is more familiar with plain hex dumps in the form of "XX XX XX XX...".

I wonder if it is possible to introduce an effective binary string type that will be represented as h"XX XX XX" in language syntax? It will be much easier to analyze printed binary data and copy/paste such data as-is from hex editors/views. On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 9:45 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote: Sounds like a good idea to try to remove redundant cookies and to remove most occasional use of non-ASCII characters outside comments (except for unittests specifically trying to test Unicode features). Personally I would use \xXX escapes instead of spelling out the characters in shlex.py, for example.

Both with or without the coding cookies, many ways of displaying text files garble characters outside the ASCII range, so it's better to stick to ASCII as much as possible. --Guido On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 1:21 AM, Alexander Belopolsky <alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com> wrote: I was looking at the inspect module and noticed that it's source starts with "# -- coding: iso-8859-1 --".   I have checked and there are no non-ascii characters in the file.   There are several other modules that still use the cookie:

Lib/ast.py:# -- coding: utf-8 -- Lib/getopt.py:# -- coding: utf-8 -- Lib/inspect.py:# -- coding: iso-8859-1 -- Lib/pydoc.py:# -- coding: latin-1 -- Lib/shlex.py:# -- coding: iso-8859-1 -- Lib/encodings/punycode.py:# -- coding: utf-8 -- Lib/msilib/init.py:# -- coding: utf-8 -- Lib/sqlite3/init.py:#-- coding: ISO-8859-1 -- Lib/sqlite3/dbapi2.py:#-- coding: ISO-8859-1 -- Lib/test/badcoding.py:# -- coding: uft-8 -- Lib/test/badsyntax3131.py:# -- coding: utf-8 -- I understand that coding: utf-8 is strictly redundant in 3.x.  There are cases such as Lib/shlex.py where using encoding other than utf-8 is justified.  (See http://svn.python.org/view?view=rev&revision=82560).  What are the guidelines for other cases?  Should redundant cookies be removed? Since not all editors respect the  -*- cookie, I think the answer should be "yes" particularly when the cookie is setting encoding other than utf-8.

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-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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