[docs] [issue23232] 'codecs' module functionality + its docs -- concerning custom codecs, especially non-string ones

Nick Coghlan report at bugs.python.org
Sat Jan 24 12:17:09 CET 2015


Nick Coghlan added the comment:

Unfortunately, a lot of these things aren't well defined in the docs because they're not especially well defined, period. The codecs module works very well if you stick to the common, well-tested paths (primarily the text encodings), but it's complex enough that there are quite a few dark corners as well.

The functional changes in 3.4 and Martin's documentation updates in issue 19548 certainly improved things a bit further.

I'm inclined to agree with Marc-Andre's comment on 20132, that we're a bit down in the weeds at the moment, without a clear shared vision of where we *want* to be for the codecs module. A couple of other big issues with the current design of the module are the fact you can't register a codec directly, you have to register a search function (which you then can't unregister) and the fact that the "is a text encoding" flag I added for 3.4 is private, rather than a generally available capability.

In terms of this issue, until Martin's last patch, the error handling documentation basically all assumed text codecs. The changes in that patch clarified some areas that could be tested with the bytes-bytes codecs, but left others still vague because it isn't clear what's intended behaviour, and what's an implementation accident in CPython.

I've added MAL to the nosy list here as well, since if anyone is going to know the *intended* interaction between error handlers and arbitrary codecs its MAL.

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nosy: +lemburg

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