[Python-ideas] os.path.isbinary

[Alexander Belopolsky]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 10:11 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>wrote:

> Still can't be done reliably, but even if it could, what's so special
> about ASCII?


Lots of things are special about ASCII.  It is a 7-bit subset of pretty
much every modern encoding scheme.  Being 7-bit, it can be fairly reliably
distinguished from most binary formats.   Same is true about UTF-8.   It is
very unlikely that a binary dump of a double array make a valid UTF-8 text
and vice versa - UTF-8 text interpreted as a list of doubles is unlikely to
produce numbers that are in a reasonable range.

I would not mind seeing an "istext()" function somewhere in the stdlib that
would only recognize ASCII and UTF-8 as text.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20130731/08fc8ee6/attachment.html>