[Python-ideas] Adding str.isascii() ?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 05:42:31PM +0900, INADA Naoki wrote:

> If str has str.isascii() method, it can be simpler:
> 
> `if s.isascii() and s.isdigit():`
> 
> I want to add it in Python 3.7 if there are no opposite opinions.

I have no objection to isascii, but I don't think it goes far enough. 
Sometimes I want to know whether a string is compatible with Latin-1 or 
UCS-2 as well as ASCII. For that, I used a function that exposes the 
size of code points in bits:


@property
def size(self):
    # This can be implemented much more efficiently in CPython.
    c = ord(max(self)) if self else 0
    if c <= 0x7F:
        return 7
    elif c <= 0xFF:
        return 8
    elif c <= 0xFFFF:
        return 16
    else:
        assert c <= 0x10FFFF
        return 21


A quick test for ASCII will be:

    string.size == 7

and to test that it is entirely within the BMP (Basic Multilingual 
Plane):

    string.size <= 16



-- 
Steve