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

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> 
>> Indeed... and the same is true for almost all other methods
>> (except maybe .replace()).
>>
>> Sounds like a lot of code will break.
> 
> 
> We will see. The default string type will be Unicode, so code
> using .lower will continue to work in many cases.
> 
> The question is what open(path,"r").read() will return. It seems
> that Guido wants users to specify "rb" if they want that to be
> byte strings.

This would imply that we'd need to add an encoding parameter
that becomes a required parameter in case 'r' (without 'b')
is specified as mode.

Perhaps we should drop 'b' altogether and make encoding
a required parameter. We could have a 'binary' codec which
then passes through the data as is (as buffer object instead
of as Unicode object for most other codecs).

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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