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

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Wed Feb 15 02:30:29 CET 2006

Guido van Rossum wrote:

The only remaining question is what if anything to do with an encoding argment when the first argument is of type str...)

From what you said earlier about str in 2.x being interpretable as a unicode string which contains only ascii, it seems to me that if you say

bytes(s, encoding)

where s is a str, then by the presence of the encoding argument you're saying that you want s to be treated as unicode and encoded using the specified encoding. So the result should be the same as

bytes(u, encoding)

where u is a unicode string containing the same code points as s. This implies that it should be an error if s contains non-ascii characters.

This interpretation would satisfy the requirement for a single call signature covering both unicode and str-used-as-ascii-characters, while providing a different call signature (without encoding) for str-used-as-bytes.

-- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | Carpe post meridiam! | Christchurch, New Zealand | (I'm not a morning person.) | greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+

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