On Wed, 24 May 2023 at 08:57, Rob Cliffe <rob.cli...@btinternet.com> wrote: > > Do you mean "ASCII or UTF-8"? Because decoding as UTF-8 is fine with > > ASCII (it's a superset). You should always consistently get the same > > data type (bytes or text) based on the library you're using. > > > > ChrisA > OK, bad example. The point remains: condensing each step to a single > chained function can come unstuck when one of the steps needs to be made > more complicated for some reason.
That's fair. Still, I wouldn't over-complicate a piece of code "just in case" it needs to become more complicated in the future. I'd rather code to what's needed now, and if that's a simple "decode as UTF-8", that's great; maybe in the future I need to cope with an insane system like "decode line by line, attempting UTF-8 first and falling back on Windows-1252, then rejoin the lines", and that's the time to implement that. (Yes, I have had to do that. Although I think I cheated and used ISO-8859-1 instead. It was a lot easier and I didn't really care about precise handling, so long as MOST things were readable.) ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
