[Python-Dev] bytes type discussion (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri Feb 17 07:11:12 CET 2006

"Guido" == Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> writes:

Guido> I think that the implementation of encoding-guessing or
Guido> auto-encoding-upgrade techniques should be left out of the
Guido> standard library design for now.

As far as I can see, little new design is needed. There's no reason why an encoding-guesser couldn't be written as a codec that detects the coding, then dispatches to the appropriate codec. The only real issue I know of is that if you ask such a codec "who are you?", there are two plausible answers: "autoguess" and the codec actually being used to translate the stream. If there's no API to ask for both of those, the API might want generalization.

Guido> As far as searching bytes objects, that shouldn't be a
Guido> problem as long as the search 'string' is also specified as
Guido> a bytes object.

You do need to be a little careful in implementation, as (for example) "case insensitive" should be meaningless for searching bytes objects. This would be especially important if searching and collation become more Unicode conformant.

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