[Python-Dev] Dropping bytes "support" in json

[Mark Hammond]

[Dropping email sig]

On 11/04/2009 1:06 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

> However, I really think that this question cannot be answered by
> reading the RFC. It should be answered by verifying how people use
> the json library in 2.x.

In the absence of anything more formal, here are 2 anecdotes:

* The python-twitter package seems to:
   - Use dumps() mainly to get string objects.  It uses it both for 
__str__, and for an API called 'AsJsonString' - the intent of this seems 
to be to provide strings for the consumer of the twitter API - its not 
clear how such consumers would use them.  Note that this API doesn't 
seem to need to 'write' json objects, else I suspect they would then be 
expecting dumps to return bytes to put on the wire.  They expect loads 
to accept the bytes they are reading directly off the wire.

* couchdb's wrappers use these functions purely as bytes - they are 
either decoding an application/json object from the bits they read, or 
they are encoding it to use directly in the body of a request (or even 
directly in the URL of the request!)

I find myself conflicted.  On one hand I believe the most common use of 
json will be to exchange data with something inherently byte-based.  On 
the other hand though, json itself seems to be naturally "stringy" and 
the most natural interface for a casual user would be strings.

I'm personally leaning slightly towards strings, putting the burden on 
bytes-users of json to explicitly use the appropriate encoding, even in 
cases where it *must* be utf8.  On the other hand, I'm too lazy to dig 
back through this large thread, but I seem to recall a suggestion that 
using bytes would be significantly faster.  If that is true, I'd be 
happy to settle for bytes as I believe the most common *actual* use of 
json will be via things like the twitter and couch libraries - and may 
even be a key bottleneck for such libraries - so people will not be 
directly exposed to its interface...

Mark

Cheers,

Mark