On Mon, Jun 22, 2010 at 7:27:31 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:

On Tue, 22 Jun 2010 08:03:58 am Nick Coghlan wrote:

...

So, to boil down the ebytes idea, it is basically a request for a second string type that holds an octet stream plus an encoding name, rather than a Unicode character stream.

Do any other languages have any equivalent to this ebtyes type?

Ruby seems to do this: http://yokolet.blogspot.com/2009/07/design-and-implementation-of-ruby-m17n.h... I don't use ruby myself, and I'm probably missing some subtle flaws, but the exposition at that link makes sense to me. cheers, Jess