<html><head/><body><html><head></head><body>I just realized I misexpressed myself...again. I meant ASCII or binary, not text or binary. Kind of like the old FTP programs. The implementation would determine if it was ASCII or binary.<br>
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And, the '/nothingness/is/eternal' is a quote from Xemnas in Kingdom Hearts. I was hoping someone would pick it up.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap:break-word; font-family: sans-serif; margin-top: 0px">On 7/31/2013 3:03 PM, Ryan wrote:<br /><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;">1.The link I provided wasn't how I wanted it to be.</blockquote><br />And there is no 'one way' that will satisfy everyone, or every most <br />people, as they will have different use cases for 'istext'.<br /><br /><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;">I was using it as an example to show it wasn't impossible.</blockquote><br />It is obviously possible to apply any arbitrary predicate to any object <br />within its input domain. No one has claimed otherwise that I know of.<br /><br /><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;">2.You yourself stated it doesn't work on UTF-8 files.
If you wanted one<br />that worked on all text files, it wouldn't work right.</blockquote><br />The problem is that the problem is ill-defined. Every file is (or can be <br />viewed as) a sequence of binary bytes. Every file can be interpreted as <br />a text file encoded with any of the encodings (like at least some <br />latin-1 encodings, and the IBM PC Graphics encoding) that give a <br />character meaning to every byte. So, to be strict, every file is both <br />binary and text. Python allows us to open any file as either binary or <br />text (with some encoding, with latin-1 one of the possible choices).<br /><br />The pragmatic question is 'Is this file 'likely' *intended* to be <br />interpreted as text, given that the creator is a member of our *local <br />culture*. For the function you referenced, the 'local culture' is <br />'closed Western European'. For 'closed American', the threshold of <br />allowed non-ascii text and control chars should be more like 0 or 1%. <br
/>For many cultures, the referenced function is nonsensical.<br /><br />For an open global context, istext would have to try all standard text <br />encodings and for those that worked, apply the grammar rules of the <br />languages that normally are encoded with that encoding.<br /></pre></blockquote></div><br>
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