On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 12:04:23AM -0700, Chris Lasher wrote:
[...]
I would like to gauge the feasibility of a PEP to change the printable representation of bytes in CPython 3 to display all elements by their hexadecimal values, and only by their hexadecimal values.
I'm very sympathetic to this "purity" approach. I too consider it a shame that the repr of byte-strings in Python 3 pretends to be ASCII-ish[1], regardless of the source of the bytes. Alas, not only do we have backward compatibility to consider -- there are now five versions of Python 3 where bytes display as ASCII -- but practicality as well. There are many use-cases where human-readable ASCII bytes are embedded inside otherwise binary bytes. To my regret, I don't think purity arguments are strong enough to justify a change.
However, I do support Terry's suggestion that bytes (and, I presume, bytearray) grow some sort of easy way of displaying the bytes in hex. The trouble is, what do we actually want?
b'Abc' --> '0x416263' b'Abc' --> '\x41\x62\x63'
I can see use-cases for both. After less than two minutes of thought, it seems to me that perhaps the most obvious APIs for these two different representations are:
hex(b'Abc') --> '0x416263' b'Abc'.decode('hexescapes') --> '\x41\x62\x63'
[1] They're not *strictly* ASCII, since ASCII doesn't support ordinal values above 127.