[Python-ideas] format specifier for "not bytes"

[Paul Moore]

On 24 August 2012 21:21, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Paul! You could probably guess that this is the wheel digital
> signatures package. All the string formatting arguments (I hope) are
> now passed to binary() or native() string conversion functions that do
> less on Python 2.7 than on Python 3.

One point that this raises. Any such "string-only" format spec would
only be available in Python 3.4+, and almost certainly only in
format(). So if you're interested in something that works across
Python 2 and 3, you wouldn't be able to use it anyway (and something
like the must_be_str function is probably your best bet). On the other
hand, if you're targeting 3.4+ only, the bytes/string code is probably
cleaner (that being a lot of the point of the Python 3 exercise :-))
and so the need for a string-only spec may be a lot less.

I dunno. I haven't hit a lot of encoding type issues myself, so I
don't have much background in what might help. OTOH, what I *have*
found is that the change in thinking that Python 3's approach pushes
onto me (encode/decode at the edges and use str consistently
internally, plus never gloss over the fact that you have to know an
encoding to convert bytes <-> str) fixes a lot of "problems" I thought
I was having...

Paul.