[Python-Dev] Python 3.x and bytes (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Wed May 18 07:39:40 CEST 2011

Ethan Furman wrote:

On the one hand we have the 'bytes are ascii data' type interface, and on the other we have the 'bytes are a list of integers between 0 - 256' interface.

I think the weird part is that there exists a literal for writing a byte array as an ascii string, and furthermore that it's the only kind of literal available for bytes.

Personally I think that the default literal syntax for bytes, and also the form produced by repr(), should have been something more neutral, such as hex, with the ascii form available for use when it makes sense. Currently if you want to write a bytes literal in hex, you have to say something like

some_var = b'\xde\xad\xbe\xef'

which is ugly and unreadable. Much nicer would be

some_var = x'deadbeef'

As for

--> someothervar[3] == b'd'

there ought to be a literal for specifying an integer using an ascii character, so you could say something like

if some_other_var[3] == c'd':

which would be equivalent to

if some_other_var[3] == ord(b'd')

but without the overhead of computing the value each time at run time.

-- Greg

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