[Python-3000] New io system and binary data (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Sep 19 23:00:39 CEST 2007

On 9/19/07, Fred Drake <fdrake at acm.org> wrote:

On Sep 19, 2007, at 3:58 PM, Jason Orendorff wrote: > Given the context (stdin/stdout/stderr), I'd love to know what you're > thinking of here. I can't name a program offhand that wants to > operate on binary data via a pipeline. There are a few that can, > like gzip, but my impression is that even those aren't often used that > way anymore.

Huh. I use pipelines constructed in the shell for binary data regularly; I don't see any reason not to do that. I'd certainly rather see the stdio streams be available as binary data, possibly with convenient text-centric wrappers also available. But I'd be fine with constructing those myself.

I agree that binary pipelines are useful and should be possible. I just don't think this should be the default behavior for stdin/stdout.

Since the binary stream underlying stdin is readily available as sys.stdin.buffer (and ditto for stdout and even stderr) I don't think any action needs to be taken. note that the instance variable doesn't start with an underscore. It's part of the public API for text files.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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