[Python-Dev] PEP 460: allowing %d and %f and mojibake

[Mark Lawrence]

On 12/01/2014 17:03, Ethan Furman wrote:
> On 01/12/2014 08:21 AM, Ethan Furman wrote:
>> On 01/12/2014 08:09 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
>>> On 13 Jan 2014 01:22, "Kristján Valur Jónsson" wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Imho, this is not equivalent to re-introducing automatic type
>>>> conversion between binary/unicode, it is adding a
>>>> specific convenience function for explicitly asking for ASCII encoding.
>>>
>>> It is not explicit, it is implicit - whether or not the resulting
>>> string assumes ASCII compatibility or not depends on
>>> whether you pass a binary value (no assumption) or a string value
>>> (assumes ASCII compatibility).
>>
>> Nick, I don't understand what you are saying here.  Are you saying
>> that the result of b'%s' % var may be either a bytes
>> object or a str object?  Because that would be wrong -- it would
>> always be a bytes object.
>
> Okay, I just went and took a closer look at the asciistr type [1].  For
> what it's worth I don't think this is Antoine's understanding of what we
> [2] are asking for, nor is it what we are asking for (I'm sure Antoine
> will correct me if I'm wrong. ;)
>
> We know full well the difference between unicode and bytes, and we know
> full well that numbers and much of the text we need has an ASCII
> (bytes!) representation.  When we do a b'Content Length: %d' %
> len(binary_data) we are expecting to get back a bytes object, /not/ a
> unicode object.
>
> Your asciistr, which sometimes returns bytes and sometimes returns text,
> is absolutely *not* what we want.

I've just tried asciistr using your test code (having corrected the 
typo, it's assertIsInstance, not assertIsinstance :) and it looks like a 
very good starting point.  Have you, or anyone else for that matter, 
actually tried asciistr out?

>
> --
> ~Ethan~
>
>
> [1] https://github.com/jeamland/asciicompat
> [2] the dbf and pdf folks, at least


-- 
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask 
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence