[Python-Dev] Bytes path support (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Thu Aug 21 19:27:21 CEST 2014

Marko Rauhamaa writes:

My point is that the poor programmer cannot ignore the possibility of "funny" character sets.

Poor programmers do it all the time. That's why Python codecs raise when they encounter bytes they can't handle.

If Python tried to protect the programmer from that possibility,

I don't understand your point. The existing interfaces aren't going anywhere, and they're enough to do anything you need to do. Although there are a few radicals (like me in a past life :-) who might like to see them go away in favor of opt-in to binary encoding via surrogateescape error handling, nobody in their right mind supports us.

The question here is not about going backward, it's about whether to add new bytes APIs, and which ones.

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