On Apr 12, 10:06 am, Kay Schluehr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 12 Apr., 14:44, Christian Heimes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Gabriel Genellina schrieb: > > > > On the last line, str(x), I would expect 'abc' - same as str(x, 'ascii') > > > above. But I get the same as repr(x) - is this on purpose? > > > Yes, it's on purpose but it's a bug in your application to call str() on > > a bytes object or to compare bytes and unicode directly. Several months > > ago I added a bytes warning option to Python. Start Python as "python > > -bb" and try it again. ;) > > > Christian > > And making an utf-8 encoding default is not possible without writing a > new function?
I believe the Zen in effect here is, "In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess." How do you know if the bytes are utf-8 encoded? I'm not sure if str() returning the repr() of a bytes object (when not passed an encoding) is the right thing, but it's probably better than throwing an exception. The problem is, str can't decide whether it's a type conversion operator or a formatted printing function--if it were strongly one or the other it would be a lot more obvious what to do. Carl Banks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
