new method for string objects

[Andrew Dalke]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
>>>> s = u"123"
>>>> b = buffer(s)
>>>> b
><read-only buffer for 7969b0, ptr 7969d0, size 6 at 796530>
>>>> len(b)
>6
>>>> b[0]
>'1'
>>>> str(b)
>'1\0002\0003\000'
>>>> fp.write(b) # writes raw contents to file without extra copy


BTW, what I'm really surprised about is that the following works:

a = "GAATAAC"
b = buffer(a)
import string
string.count(b, "A")

I guess that's what it means when the string code wants
a "read-only character buffer".  There's something fundamental
I'm missing on how strings and buffers work in Python.  Looks
like it's time to look at source code.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at acm.org