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

[Python-Dev] bytes / unicode

Glyph Lefkowitz glyph at twistedmatrix.com
Wed Jun 23 02:23:56 CEST 2010

On Jun 22, 2010, at 12:53 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 11:47 PM, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote:

On Jun 21, 2010, at 10:31 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote: This is a common pain-point for porting software to 3.x - you had a string, it kinda worked most of the time before, but now you need to keep track of text too and the functions which seemed to work on bytes no longer do. Thanks Glyph. That is a nice summary of one kind of challenge facing programmers. Ironically, Glyph also described the pain in 2.x: it only "kinda" worked.

It was not my intention to be ironic about it - that was exactly what I meant :). 3.x is forcing you to confront an issue that you should have confronted for 2.x anyway.

(And, I hope, most libraries doing a 3.x migration will take the opportunity to make their 2.x APIs unicode-clean while still in 2to3 mode, and jump ship to 3.x source only after there's a nice transition path for their clients that can be taken in 2 steps.)

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