Andy Robinson <captainrobbo@yahoo.com> wrote:

So I would take flush() to mean 'shift back to ASCII now'.

if we're still talking about my "just one codec, please" proposal, that's exactly what encoder.flush should do. while decoder.flush should raise an ex- ception if you're still in double byte mode (at least if running in 'strict' mode).

Calling flush and reopen would thus "almost" get the same data across.

I'm trying to think if it would be dangerous. Do web and ftp servers often call flush() in the middle of transmitting a block of text?

again, if we're talking about my proposal, these flush methods are only called by the string or stream wrappers, never by the applications. see the original post for de- tails. </F>