On 2/9/2012 11:30 PM, Matt Joiner wrote:
Not true, it's necessary to understand that encodings translate to and from bytes,
Only if you use byte encodings for ascii text. I never have, and I would not know why you do unless you are using internet modules that do not sufficiently hide such details. Anyway...
b = b'abc' u = str(b) b = bytes(u, 'ascii')
So one only needs to know one encoding name, which most should know anyway, and that it *is* an encoding name.
and how to use the API.
Give the required parameter, which is standard.
In 2.x you rarely needed to know what unicode is.
All one *needs* to know about unicode, that I can see, is that unicode is a superset of ascii, that ascii number codes remain the same, and that one can ignore just about everything else until one uses (or wants to know about) non-ascii characters. Since one will see 'utf-8' here and there, it is probably to know that the utf-8 encoding is a superset of the ascii encoding, so that ascii text *is* utf-8 text. -- Terry Jan Reedy