[Python-Dev] methods on the bytes object

[Guido van Rossum]

On 4/30/06, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> Josiah Carlson wrote:
> > Specifically in the case of bytes.join(), the current common use-case of
> > <literal>.join(...) would become something similar to
> > bytes(<literal>).join(...), unless bytes objects got a syntax... Or
> > maybe I'm missing something?
>
> I think what you are missing is that algorithms that currently operate
> on byte strings should be reformulated to operate on character strings,
> not reformulated to operate on bytes objects.

Well, yes, in most cases, but while attempting to write an I/O library
I already had the urge to collect "chunks" I've read in a list and
join them later, instead of concatenating repeatedly. I guess I should
suppress this urge, and plan to optimize extending a bytes arrays
instead, along the lines of how we optimize lists.

Still, I expect that having a bunch of string-ish methods on bytes
arrays would be convenient for certain types of data handling. Of
course, only those methods that don't care about character types would
be added, but that's a long list: startswith, endswith, index, rindex,
find, rfind, split, rsplit, join, count, replace, translate. (I'm
skipping center, ljust and rjust since they seem exclusive to text
processing. Ditto for strip/lstrip/rstrip although an argument for
those could probably be made, with mandatory 2nd arg.)

Unhelpfully y'rs,

--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)