On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 2:47 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 10:51 AM, Aldcroft, Thomas < aldcroft@head.cfa.harvard.edu> wrote:
On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 1:04 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov>
wrote:
- round-tripping of binary data (at least with Python's encoding/decoding) -- ANY string of bytes can be decodes as latin-1 and re-encoded to get the same bytes back. You may get garbage, but you won't get an EncodingError.
+1. The key point is that there is a HUGE amount of legacy science data in the form of FITS (astronomy-specific binary file format that has been the primary file format for 20+ years) and HDF5 which uses a character data type to store data which can be bytes 0-255. Getting an decoding/encoding error when trying to deal with these datasets is a non-starter from my perspective.
That says to me that these are properly represented by `bytes` objects, not `unicode/str` objects encoding to and decoding from a hardcoded latin-1 encoding.
If you could go back 30 years and get every scientist in the world to do the right thing, then sure. But we are living in a messy world right now with messy legacy datasets that have character type data that are *mostly* ASCII, but not infrequently contain non-ASCII characters. So I would beg to actually move forward with a pragmatic solution that addresses very real and consequential problems that we face instead of waiting/praying for a perfect solution. - Tom
-- Robert Kern
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