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

[Python-Dev] bytes / unicode

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Mon Jun 21 19:45:20 CEST 2010

On 6/21/2010 8:51 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

I don't know that the "all is well" camp actually exists. The camp that I do see existing is the one that says "without a bug report, inconsistencies in the standard library's unicode handling won't get fixed". The issues picked up by the regression test suite have already been dealt with, but that suite is unfortunately far from comprehensive. Just like a lot of Python code that is out there, the standard library isn't immune to the poor coding practices that were permitted by the blurry lines between text and octet streams in 2.x. It may be that there are places where we need to rewrite standard library algorithms to be bytes/str neutral (e.g. by using length one slices instead of indexing). It may be that there are more APIs that need to grow "encoding" keyword arguments that they then pass on to the functions they call or use to convert str arguments to bytes (or vice-versa). But without people trying to port affected libraries and reporting bugs when they find issues, the situation isn't going to improve. Now, if these bugs are already being reported against 3.1 and just aren't getting fixed, that's a completely different story...

Some of the above have been, over a year ago. See, for instance, http://bugs.python.org/issue5468 I am getting the impression that the people who use the web modules tend, like me, to not have the tools to write and test patches . So they can squeak but not grease.

Terry Jan Reedy

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