<martin <at> v.loewis.de> writes:
A couple of people have said that 'native string' is spelt 'str', but I'm not sure that's the right answer. For example, 2.x's cString.StringIO expects native strings, not Unicode:
Your counter-example is non-ASCII characters/bytes. I doubt that this is a valid use case; in a "native" string, these shouldn't occur (i.e. native strings should always be ASCII), since the semantics of non-ASCII changes drastically between 2.x and 3.x. So whoever defines some API to take "native" strings can't have defined a valid use of non-ASCII in that interface.
It might not be a valid usage, but the 2.x ecosystem has numerous occurrences of invalid usages, which tend to crop up when porting because of 3.x's increased strictness. In the example I gave, cStringIO.StringIO should be able to cope with text strings, but doesn't. Of course there are StringIO.StringIO and io.StringIO in 2.6, but when porting a project, you can't be sure which of these you might run into.
Indeed it should. If there is a known application of non-ASCII native strings, I surely would like to know what that is.
I can't think of a specific instance off-hand, but I seem to recall having problems with some of the cookie APIs insisting on native strings (rather than text, which is validated against ASCII where appropriate). Regards, Vinay Sajip