[Python-Dev] PEP 332 revival in coordination with pep 349? [ Was:Re: release plan for 2.5 ?] (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Feb 14 00:44:27 CET 2006

On 2/13/06, Michael Foord <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:

Phillip J. Eby wrote: [snip..] > > In fact, the 'encoding' argument seems useless in the case of str objects, > and it seems it should default to latin-1 for unicode objects. The only > -1 for having an implicit encode that behaves differently to other implicit encodes/decodes that happen in Python. Life is confusing enough already.

But adding an encoding doesn't help. The str.encode() method always assumes that the string itself is ASCII-encoded, and that's not good enough:

"abc".encode("latin-1") 'abc' "abc".decode("latin-1") u'abc' "abc\xf0".decode("latin-1") u'abc\xf0' "abc\xf0".encode("latin-1") Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ? UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xf0 in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)

The right way to look at this is, as Phillip says, to consider conversion between str and bytes as not an encoding but a data type change only.

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

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