[Python-Dev] file() or open()?

[Nick Bastin]

On Jul 7, 2004, at 12:51 AM, Mike Brown wrote:

> Nick Bastin wrote:
>> I could see a future where open() would support any valid URI
>
> -1.
>
> This already exists, mostly, in urllib.urlopen(), which happens to be 
> very
> lenient in what it will accept as a "URL" to open. It attempts to 
> guess at the
> intended behavior, regardless of whether the argument was a URI 
> (possibly
> relative) or an OS path (possibly relative) or some hybrid of the two. 
> Often
> it is impossible to tell based on syntax alone what type of
> thing-to-be-dreferenced the argument is, so the function errs on the 
> side of
> what's most likely -- not that it goes to great lengths.

Keep in mind that I'm not actually suggesting that it *do* that, but 
merely as an example that open() could have a different behaviour from 
file().

--
Nick