[Python-Dev] Multilingual programming article on the Red Hat Developer blog

[Glenn Linderman]

On 9/16/2014 5:21 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> It isn't, because the bytes/str problem was that given a str object
> out of context you could not tell whether it was a binary blob or
> text, and if text, you couldn't tell if it was external encoded text
> or internal abstract text.
>
> That is not true here because the representations of characters vs.
> smuggled bytes in str are disjoint sets.

Actually, while it may be true that for the email headers case, all 
characters are characters, just the encoding is unknown, it is not 
necessarily true that they are in disjoint sets. Some bytes may decode 
into characters without needing to be smuggled... maybe not in 
text-protocols like email, but in the general case. So then some of the 
bytes that should be interpreted as binary data are not in a disjoint 
set from characters.
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