[Python-ideas] RFC: bytestring as a str representation [was: a new bytestring type?]

[Ethan Furman]

On 01/07/2014 05:00 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Ethan Furman writes:
>>
>> I just read your proposal again, and must admit I don't understand
>> how it would help me, but I look forward to testing an
>> implementation!
>>
>> One wrinkle, though -- the data is binary, and if read would have
>> to be read using the latin1 codec...
>
> If you mean to process the binary, it would depend on what you want to
> do whether it would help or not.  struct- and ctypes-style processing,
> no, it won't help because you need to convert to bytes to use those.
> (It might make sense to read the headers into a buffer this way, parse
> them as ASCII-compatible text, and then read the rest as bytes.)  Pure
> byte code, doesn't help, although it probably doesn't hurt.

Sounds like it doesn't help me then.  My binary stream is mixed:

   - binary that has to be converted (4-byte ints, for example)
   - ascii that has to be converted (ints stored as ascii text)
   - encoded text (character and memo fields)

and the precise location of each varies from file to file.

--
~Ethan~