[Python-Dev] Re: adding a bytes sequence type to Python (original) (raw)

Skip Montanaro skip at pobox.com
Wed Aug 18 04:03:03 CEST 2004 

Guido> The string argument support may not even be necessary -- an
Guido> alternative way to spell that would be to let s.decode() return a
Guido> bytes object, which has the advantage of being explicit about the
Guido> encoding; there's even a base64 encoding already!

I'm sorry folks, but I still don't understand all this discussion overlap between unicode/string objects (which require explicit or implicit decoding) and bytes objects (which clearly must not). Everyone keeps talking about decoding stuff into bytes objects and whether or not bytes literals would be compatible with the current source encoding. My understanding is that bytes objects are just that, raw sequences of bytes in the range 0x00 to 0xff, inclusive, with no interpretation of any type.

Skip

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