[Python-Dev] Trying to focus the whole bytes/str formatting discussion (original) (raw)

Cameron Simpson cs at zip.com.au
Mon Jan 13 00:25:11 CET 2014

On 12Jan2014 17:46, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:

THE EIBTI group are willing to support PEP 460 but beyond that don't want to have in Python itself anything for bytes.format() which takes in a string and spits out bytes. It's bytes in->bytes out and not bytes & str in->bytes out as the PBP group is after. The EIBTI group are arguing that letting str into bytes.format() and then automatically be converted to strict ASCII leads to conflating the text/bytes divide as well as being too magical, e.g. what if you actually wanted UTF-16 for you number string instead of ASCII; the EIBTI group wants to force people to make a decision. They are also less concerned with making users update Python 2 code to handle this as it already needs to be updated for other Python 3 things anyway. [...]

I'm in the EIBTI on the whole, but I would also be happy for the bytes.format() function to accept strings (and floats or whatever the str.format supports) provided it required an explicit encoding= parameter to enable it.

i.e. make it easy to use, but require an overt specification of the str->bytes encoding.

You don't even need a special mode, but have it raise a ValueError if the (default) encoding is None when an encoding became needed.

Just my 2c on Brett's EIBTI vs PBP divide. I'll try to stay off this thread now and bikeshed only in the others...

Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au>

You can blip it twice to clear the bore, But blip it thrice, and you've sinned once more. - Tom Warner <tom at dfind.demon.co.uk>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list