[python-win32] python3 and extended mapi

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On Jun 9, 2014, at 2:53 PM, Christian K. <ckkart at hoc.net> wrote:

> <Paul_Koning <at> Dell.com> writes:
> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Jun 9, 2014, at 9:07 AM, Christian K. <ckkart <at> hoc.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> I was very pleased to see that retrieving properties of a MAPI object yields
>>> either a <str> or <bytes> type depending on whether the _A or _W property
>>> was queried …
>> 
>> Really?  That seems strange.  As I recall, the *_W APIs are “wide
> character” ones.  So in Python 3, they
>> should both map to <str> type.  <bytes> applies only to non-text data.
> 
> At least for text properties like e.g. PR_SUBJECT_A / _W the former returns
> a mbcs encoded "string", i.e. of bytes type and the latter a 2-byte unicode
> string. Binary properties are always returned as bytes in contrast to
> earlier when using pyrhon2.

Yes, “bytes” for binary values is clearly correct.  But MBCS and “2 byte Unicode” (more accurately called either UCS-2 or UCS-2 BMP subset, not sure which) are both text strings.  The different encoding in the API doesn’t mean they should be different datatypes in Python 3; both cases are properly mapped to “str”.

	paul