[Python-Dev] Deprecate codecs.open() and StreamWriter/StreamReader (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Wed May 25 11:38:10 CEST 2011

Walter Dörwald wrote:

On 24.05.11 12:58, Victor Stinner wrote:

Le mardi 24 mai 2011 à 12:42 +0200, Łukasz Langa a écrit :

Wiadomość napisana przez Walter Dörwald w dniu 2011-05-24, o godz. 12:16:

I don't see which usecase is not covered by TextIOWrapper. But I know some cases which are not supported by StreamReader/StreamWriter. This could be be partially fixed by implementing generic StreamReader/StreamWriter classes that reuse the incremental codecs, but I don't think thats worth it. Why not? We have already an implementation of this idea, it is called io.TextIOWrapper. Exactly. From another post by Victor: As I wrote, codecs.open() is useful in Python 2. But I don't know any program or library using directly StreamReader or StreamWriter. So: implementing this is a lot of work, duplicates existing functionality and is mostly unused.

You are missing the point: we have StreamReader and StreamWriter APIs on codecs to allow each codecs to implement more efficient ways of encoding and decoding streams.

Examples of such optimizations are reading the stream in chunks that can be decoded in one piece, or writing to the stream in a way that doesn't generate encoding state problems on the receiving end by ending transmission half-way through a shift block.

Of course, you won't find many direct uses of these APIs, since most of the time, applications will simply use codecs.open() to automatically benefit from these optimizations.

OTOH, TextIOWrapper doesn't know anything about specific encodings and thus does not allow for such optimizations to be implemented by codecs.

We don't have many such specialized implementations in the stdlib, but this doesn't mean that there's no use for them. It just means that developers and users are simply unaware of the possibilities opened by these stateful stream APIs.

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