On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 6:16 AM, P.J. Eby <p...@telecommunity.com> wrote: > True, but making it a separate type with a required encoding gets rid of the > magical "I don't know" - the "I don't know" encoding is just a plain old > bytes object.
So, to boil down the ebytes idea, it is basically a request for a second string type that holds an octet stream plus an encoding name, rather than a Unicode character stream. Calling it "ebytes" seems to emphasise the wrong parallel in that case (you have a 'str' object with a different internal structure, not any kind of bytes object). For now I'll call it an "altstr". Then the idea can be described as - altstr would expose the same API as str, NOT the same API as bytes - explicit conversion via "str" would use the altstr's __str__ method - explicit conversion via "bytes" would use the altstr's __bytes__ method - implicit interaction with str would convert the str to an altstr object according to the altstr's rules. This may be best handled via a coercion method on altstr, rather than str actually needing to know the details (i.e. an altrstr.__coerce_str__() method). For the 'ebytes' model, this would do something like "type(self)(other.encode(self.encoding), self.encoding))". The operation would then be handled by the corresponding method on the coerced object. A new type could then override operations such as __contains__, __mod__, format() and join(). This is still smelling an awful lot like the 2.x str type to me, but supporting a __coerce_str__ method may allow some useful experimentation in this space (as PJE suggested). There's a chance it would be abused, but it offers a greater chance of success than trying to come up with a concrete altstr type without providing a means for experimentation first. > (In principle, you could then drop *all* the stringlike methods from > plain-old-bytes objects. If it's really text-in-bytes you want, you should > use an ebytes with the encoding specified.) Except that a lot of those string-like methods are just plain useful, even when you *know* you're dealing with an octet stream rather than latin-1 encoded text. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
