[Python-Dev] bytes type

Tue Oct 4 02:37:42 CEST 2005

Le lundi 03 octobre 2005 à 14:02 -0700, Guido van Rossum a écrit :
> On 10/3/05, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> > Could the "bytes" type be just the same as the current "str" type but
> > without the implicit unicode conversion ? Or am I missing some desired
> > functionality ?
> 
> No. It will be a mutable array of bytes. It will intentionally
> resemble strings as little as possible. There won't be a literal for
> it.

Thinking about it, it may have to offer the search and replace
facilities offered by strings (including regular expressions).

Here is an use case : say I'm reading an HTML file (or receiving it over
the network). Since the character encoding can be specified in the HTML
file itself (in the <head>...</head>), I must first receive it as a
bytes object. But then I must fetch the encoding information from the
HTML header: therefore I must use some string ops on the bytes object to
parse this information. Only after I have discovered the encoding, can I
finally convert the bytes object to a text string.

Or would there be another way to do it?