Carl Banks schrieb: > 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?
Indeed > 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. I was against it and I also wanted to have 'egg' == b'egg' raise an exception but I was overruled by Guido. At least I was allowed to implement the byte warning feature (-b and -bb arguments). I *highly* recommend that everybody runs her unit tests with the -bb option. Christian -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list