Thanks a lot Martin and Marc for the really great explanations! I was wondering if it would be reasonable to imagine a utility that will determine whether, for a given encoding, two byte strings would be equivalent. But I think such a utility will require *extensive* knowledge about many bizarrities of many encodings -- and has little chance of being pretty!
In any case, it goes well beyond the situation that triggered my original question in the first place, that basically was to provide a reasonable check on whether round-tripping a string is successful -- this is in the context of a small utility to guess an encoding and to use it to decode a byte string. This utility module was triggered by one that Skip Montanaro had written some time ago, but I wanted to add and combine several ideas and techniques (and support for my usage scenarios) for guessing a string's encoding in one convenient place. I provide a write-up and the code for it here: http://gizmojo.org/code/decodeh/ I will be very interested in any remarks any of you may have! Best regards, mario -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
