[Python-Dev] Decoding incomplete unicode (original) (raw)
Walter Dörwald walter at livinglogic.de
Wed Jul 28 11:19:09 CEST 2004
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M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
Martin v. Löwis wrote:
M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
I like the idea, but don't think the implementation is the right way to do it. Instead, I'd suggest using a new error handling strategy "break" ( = break processing as soon as errors are found). Can you demonstrate this approach in a patch? I think it is unimplementable: the codec cannot communicate to the error callback that it ran out of data. The codec can: the callback gets all the necessary information and can even manipulate the objects being worked on. But you have a point: the current implementations of the various encode/decode functions don't provide interfaces to report back the number of bytes read at C level - the codecs module wrappers add these numbers assuming that all bytes were read.
This is the correct thing to do for the stateless decoders: any incomplete byte sequence at the end of the input is an error. But then it doesn't make sense to return the number of bytes decoded for the stateless decoder, because this is always the size of the input. For the stateful decoder this is just some sort of state common to all decoders: the decoder keeps the incomplete byte sequence to be used in the next call. But then this state should be internal to the decoder and not part of the public API. This would make the decode() method more usable: When you want to implement an XML parser that supports the xml.sax.xmlreader.IncrementalParser interface, you have an API mismatch. The parser has to use the stateful decoding API (i.e. read()), which means the input is in the form of a byte stream, but this interface expects it's input as byte chunks passed to multiple calls to the feed() method. If StreamReader.decode() simply returned the decoded unicode object and keep the remaining undecoded bytes as an internal state then StreamReader.decode() would be directly usable.
But this isn't really a "StreamReader" any more, so the best solution would probably be to have a three level API:
- A stateless decoding function (what codecs.getdecoder returns now);
- A stateful "feed reader", which keeps internal state (including undecoded byte sequences) and gets passed byte chunks (should this feed reader have a error attribute or should this be an argument to the feed method?);
- A stateful stream reader that reads its input from a byte stream. The functionality for the stream reader could be implemented once using the underlying functionality of the feed reader (in fact we could implement something similar to sio's stacking streams: the stream reader would use the feed reader to wrap the byte input stream and add only a read() method. The line reading methods (readline(), readlines() and iter() could be added by another stream filter)
The error callbacks could, however, raise an exception which includes all the needed information, including any state that may be needed in order to continue with coding operation.
This makes error callbacks effectively unusable with stateful decoders.
We may then need to allow additional keyword arguments on the encode/decode functions in order to preset a start state.
As those decoding functions are private to the decoder that's probably OK. I wouldn't want to see additional keyword arguments on str.decode (which uses the stateless API anyway). BTW, that's exactly what I did for codecs.utf_7_decode_stateful, but I'm not really comfortable with the internal state of the UTF-7 decoder being exposed on the Python level. It would be better to encapsulate the state in a feed reader implemented in C, so that the state is inaccessible from the Python level.
Bye, Walter Dörwald
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