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

[Python-Dev] bytes / unicode

Lennart Regebro regebro at gmail.com
Thu Jun 24 11:05:03 CEST 2010

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 20:07, James Y Knight <foom at fuhm.net> wrote:

Yeah. This is a real issue I have with the direction Python3 went: it pushes you into decoding everything to unicode early, even when you don't care --

Well, yes, maybe even if you don't care. But often the functions you need to call must care, and then you need to decode to unicode, even if you personally don't care. And in those cases, you should deocde as early as possible.

In the cases where neither you nor the functions you call care, then you don't have to decode, and you can happily pass binary data from one function to another.

So this is not really a question of the direction Python 3 went. It's more a case that some methods that could do their transformations in a well defined way on bytes don't, and then force you to decode to unicode. But that's not a problem with direction, it's just a missing feature in the stdlib.

-- Lennart Regebro: http://regebro.wordpress.com/ Python 3 Porting: http://python3porting.com/ +33 661 58 14 64

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