[Python-ideas] bytes indexing behavior

[Sjoerd Job Postmus]

I like this idea!

    >>> k = b'hello world'
    >>> v = k[0]
    >>> type(v)
    <class 'byte'>
    >>> ord(v)
    104
    >>> v + 5
    __main__:1: DeprecationWarning: bytes items will become byte instances. Use ord().
    109

On the other hand, maybe 'hello'[0] should be a ch(a)r instead of str?

The 'wrapping' class could be a `bytearray`?

    >>> k = bytearray(b'hello')
    >>> k[0]
    104
    >>> k[2:4]
    bytearray(b'll')

The only 'downside' is that a bytearray is mutable.

> On 6 Jun 2016, at 21:35, Neil Schemenauer <nas-pythonideas at arctrix.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 2016-06-04, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>> The bytes -> int behavior is widely considered a mistake. We're just
>> not able to fix it without yet another round of layoffs ^W
>> deprecations. And I'm not ready for that -- not even Python 4 should
>> be allowed to change this unilaterally. Though maybe we could do
>> something with a __future__ import.
> 
> Maybe the following would work:
> 
> - add a new method to 'bytes' that returns a view object with the
>  current index/iteration behavior
> 
> - enable a deprecation warning for code that uses indexing/iteration
>  on bytes
> 
> - when sufficient time has passed, revert to Python 2 behavior for
>  indexing/iteration
> 
> Another, probably crazy and unworkable idea:
> 
> - have bytes indexing/iteration return a special type that behaves like
>  an int or length one byte.
> 
> - ord() of this object would return a real int
> 
> - code that utilizes this object as an int would generate a warning
>  (suggest adding an ord() call to fix code).
> 
> - eventually just return length one byte strings
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