[Python-Dev] str object going in Py3K (original) (raw)

Walter Dörwald walter at livinglogic.de
Fri Feb 17 13:45:22 CET 2006

Guido van Rossum wrote:

On 2/16/06, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:

What will be the explicit way to open a file in bytes mode and in text mode (I for one would like to move away from open() completely as well) ?

Will we have a single file type with two different modes or two different types ? I'm currently thinking of an I/O stack somewhat like Java's. At the bottom there's a class that lets you do raw unbuffered reads and writes (and seek/tell) on binary files using bytes arrays. We can layer onto this buffering, text encoding/decoding, and more. (Windows CRLF<->LF conversion is also an encoding of sorts). Years ago I wrote a prototype; checkout sandbox/sio/.

However sio.DecodingInputFilter and sio.EncodingOutputFilter don't work for encodings that need state (e.g. when reading/writing UTF-16). Switching to stateful encoders/decoders isn't so easy, because the stateful codecs require a stream-API, which brings in a whole bunch of other functionality (readline() etc.), which we'd probably like to keep separate. I have a patch (http://bugs.python.org/1101097) that should fix this problem (at least for all codecs derived from codecs.StreamReader/codecs.StreamWriter). Additionally it would make stateful codecs more useful in the context for iterators/generators.

I'd like this patch to go into 2.5.

Bye, Walter Dörwald

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