[Python-Dev] Re: adding a bytes sequence type to Python

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> 
>> It is if you stick to writing your binary data using an ASCII
>> compatible encoding -- I wouldn't expect any other encoding for
>> binary data anyway. The most common are ASCII + escape sequences,
>> base64 or hex, all of which are ASCII compatible.
> 
> 
> We probably have a different notion of "ASCII compatible" then.
> I would define it as:
> 
>  An encoding E is "ASCII compatbible" if strings that only consist
>  of ASCII characters use the same byte representation in E that
>  they use in ASCII.
> 
> In that sense, ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 are also ASCII compatible. Notice
> that this is also the definition that PEP 263 assumes.

Sorry, wrong wording on my part: I meant a string literal
that only uses ASCII characters for the literal definition,
i.e. literaldefinition.decode('ascii').encode('ascii') ==
literaldefinition.

> However, byte strings used in source code are not "safe" if they
> are encoded in ISO-8859-1 under recoding: If the source code is
> converted to UTF-8 (including the encoding declaration), then
> the length of the strings changes, as do the byte values inside
> the string.

Agreed.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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