[Python-Dev] Mailbox module - timings and functionality changes

[Steve Holden]

R. David Murray wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:54:09 -0400, Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
>> A.M. Kuchling wrote:
>>> But should mailboxes really be opened in a UTF-8 encoding, or should
>>> they be treated as 7-bit text?  I'll have to think about this.
>> Neither! You can't open them as 7-bit text, because real-world email
>> does contain bytes whose ordinal value exceeds 127. You can't open them
>> using a text encoding because theoretically there might be ASCII headers
>> that indicate that parts of the content are in specific character sets
>> or encodings.
>>
>> If only we had a data structure that easily allowed us to manipulate
>> 8-bit characters ...
> 
> email6 *will* handle this use case.  When it exists :)  But note that it
> is *not* just a matter of easily handling 8 bit characters.  There are
> a whole bunch of algorithms needed for interpreting that 7 and 8 bit data.
> All the info is there in the email headers, but being able to do string
> operations on 8 bit byte strings doesn't get you the answers you need
> by itself.
> 
> It really is the case that the Python3 bytes/unicode split forces us
> to redo most of the algorithms so that they handle bytes and text
> *correctly*.  This isn't a trivial undertaking, but the end result
> will be well worth it.
> 
I completely agree. The unusual thing here is that I of all people
should find himself running into these issues, since my use of Python is
normally pretty conservative. Since the course I am currently writing is
already overdue I have to find answers now to problems that were present
in the initial 3.0 release and have not received much attention since.

You know that I support your work to revise the email package. I hope
that we can eventually have it incorporate mailbox readers as well.

regards
 Steve
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