[Python-Dev] email package status in 3.X

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 10:28 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> Michael Urman writes:
>
>  > It is somewhat troublesome that there doesn't appear to be an obvious
>  > built-in idempotent-when-possible function that gives back the
>  > provided bytes/str,
>
> If you want something idempotent, it's already the case that
> bytes(b'abc') => b'abc'.  What might be desirable is to make
> bytes('abc') work and return b'abc', but only if 'abc' is pure ASCII
> (or maybe ISO 8859/1).

No, no, no! That's just what Python 2 did.

> Unfortunately, str(b'abc') already does work, but
>
> steve at uwakimon ~ $ python3.1
> Python 3.1.2 (release31-maint, May 12 2010, 20:15:06)
> [GCC 4.3.4] on linux2
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>> str(b'abc')
> "b'abc'"
>>>>
>
> Oops.  You can see why that probably "should" be the case.

There is a near-contract that str() of pretty much anything returns a
"printable" version of that thing.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)