[Python-Dev] Easy codec access

[Michael Hudson]

Guido van Rossum <guido@digicool.com> writes:

> > I've just checked in a set of patches which implement the new
> > .decode() method along with a couple of useful codecs.
> 
> Cool!

Indeed.  Good idea, Marc!

This is a bit unfriendly though:

>>> "bobbins".encode("gzip")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
  File "/usr/local/src/python/dist/build/Lib/encodings/__init__.py", line 59, in search_function
    raise SystemError,\
SystemError: module "encodings.gzip" failed to register

I thought SystemErrors shouldn't ever happen (isn't it what gets
raised for an illegal opcode, for example?).
 
> > To see just how easy it is to write codecs, please have
> > a look at the string codecs I added in this patch (e.g.
> > zlib_codec.py or hex_codec.py). I am pretty sure that there
> > are a lot more useful things in the standard lib which could
> > benefit from these easy-to-use interfaces.
> 
> As an excercise, I added a quoted-printable codec.  It was easy
> indeed!

urlencode would be nice.  Maybe re.escape, too.  html entities?
That's probably a bigger can of worms, but 

print "<p>%s</p>"%text.encode("html")

seems delightfully simpleminded.

Cheers,
M.

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