[Python-Dev] Idle thoughts about array objects and xmlrpclib

[Skip Montanaro]

I installed the latest version of MySQLdb yesterday and got mildly bitten by
a change Andy Dustman made.  He began returning BLOB fields as array objects
created with a 'c' typecode.  Since MySQL doesn't distinguish between TEXT
and BLOB fields, I was temporarily unable to pass SQL results back through
my XML-RPC interface (I use TEXT, but not BLOB).  Andy and I discussed it
and he decided to back out this change to MySQLdb.

That got me to thinking.  Perhaps xmlrpclib should do the obvious thing with
array objects.  For all numeric typecodes it should marshal them to lists.
For 'c' and 'u' typecodes it's a bit more problematic.  Should they be lists
or strings (or Unicode strings)?

Fredrik, have you considered whether xmlrpclib could or should support array
objects?

Skip