[Python-Dev] Generalised String Coercion

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 05:24 PM 8/7/2005 -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>Hm. What would be the use case for using %s with binary, non-text data?

Well, I could see using it to write things like netstrings, 
i.e.  sock.send("%d:%s," % (len(data),data)) seems like the One Obvious Way 
to write a netstring in today's Python at least.  But perhaps there's a 
subtlety I've missed here.