[Python-Dev] bytes / unicode

[Lennart Regebro]

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 20:07, James Y Knight <foom at fuhm.net> wrote:
> Yeah. This is a real issue I have with the direction Python3 went: it pushes
> you into decoding everything to unicode early, even when you don't care --

Well, yes, maybe even if *you* don't care. But often the functions you
need to call must care, and then you need to decode to unicode, even
if you personally don't care. And in those cases, you should deocde as
early as possible.

In the cases where neither you nor the functions you call care, then
you don't have to decode, and you can happily pass binary data from
one function to another.

So this is not really a question of the direction Python 3 went. It's
more a case that some methods that *could* do their transformations in
a well defined way on bytes don't, and then force you to decode to
unicode. But that's not a problem with direction, it's just a missing
feature in the stdlib.

-- 
Lennart Regebro: http://regebro.wordpress.com/
Python 3 Porting: http://python3porting.com/
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