[Python-Dev] IO module precisions and exception hierarchy (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Sun Sep 27 13:16:38 CEST 2009

Pascal Chambon wrote:

-> it seems that the only important matter is : file pointer positions and bytes/characters read should always be the ones that the user expects, as if there were no buffering.

That sounds right to me.

Q from me : What happens in read/write text files, when overwriting a three-bytes character with a single-byte character ?

I think you deserve whatever you get. If you want to be able to overwrite things that accurately, you should be dealing with the stream at the byte level.

Here is a very rough beginning of IOError hierarchy.

+-InvalidFileNameError (filepath max lengths, or "? / : " characters in a windows file name...)

This might be a bit too precise. Unix just has EINVAL, which covers any kind of invalid parameter, not just file names.

-- Greg

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