[Python-Dev] buffer('abc') == 'abc' is False ?!

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
>>>So, apart from the Python 2.1 requirement, subclassing str does the
>>>trick, right?
>>
>>Right.
>>
>>Would be nice if there were a standard builtin, e.g. binary(),
>>for this and maybe some support code to go with it in C (e.g.
>>the type object would be nice to have at C level).
> 
> 
> I disagree.  There are a thousand different applications, and yours
> seems rather unusual to me.

It's not at all unusual if you interface to databases. These offer
you three choices: character data, Unicode data and binary data
and each of these is handled slightly differently.

We currently don't have any notion of separating character data from
binary except the difference between Unicode and strings. Using
Unicode for character data only and reserving strings for
binary data would be nice, except that practice shows that this
doesn't always work because not all tools in the chain are
ready for Unicode just yet (including Python's stdlib itself).

Nevermind, I'll roll my own,
-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH
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