[Python-ideas] os.path.isbinary

[Ryan]

I just realized I misexpressed myself...again. I meant ASCII or binary, not text or binary. Kind of like the old FTP programs. The implementation would determine if it was ASCII or binary.

And, the '/nothingness/is/eternal' is a quote from Xemnas in Kingdom Hearts. I was hoping someone would pick it up.

Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

>On 7/31/2013 3:03 PM, Ryan wrote:
>> 1.The link I provided wasn't how I wanted it to be.
>
>And there is no 'one way' that will satisfy everyone, or every most 
>people, as they will have different use  cases for 'istext'.
>
>> I was using it as an example to show it wasn't impossible.
>
>It is obviously possible to apply any arbitrary predicate to any object
>
>within its input domain. No one has claimed otherwise that I know of.
>
>> 2.You yourself stated it doesn't work on UTF-8 files. If you wanted
>one
>> that worked on all text files, it wouldn't work right.
>
>The problem is that the problem is ill-defined. Every file is (or can
>be 
>viewed as) a sequence of binary bytes. Every file can be interpreted as
>
>a text file encoded with any of the encodings (like at least some 
>latin-1 encodings, and the IBM PC Graphics encoding) that give a 
>character meaning to every byte. So, to be strict, every file is both 
>binary and text. Python allows us to open any file as either binary or 
>text (with some encoding, with latin-1 one of the possible choices).
>
>The pragmatic question is 'Is this file 'likely' *intended* to be 
>interpreted as text, given that the creator is a member of our *local 
>culture*. For the function you referenced, the 'local culture' is 
>'closed Western European'. For 'closed American', the threshold of 
>allowed non-ascii text and control chars should be more like 0 or 1%. 
>For many cultures, the referenced function is nonsensical.
>
>For an open global context, istext would have to try all standard text 
>encodings and for those that worked, apply the grammar rules of the 
>languages that normally are encoded with that encoding.
>
>-- 
>Terry Jan Reedy
>
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-- 
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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