[Tutor] Polymorphic function in Python 2 & 3?

[Albert-Jan Roskam]

Hi,

I have a class and I want it's initializer to be able to take both byte strings (python 3: byte objects) and unicode strings (python 3: strings). So it's foward compatible Python 2 code (or backward compatible Python 3 code, if you like). If needed, the arguments of __init__ are converted into bytes using a function called encode(). I pasted the code that I wrote here: http://pastebin.com/2WBQ0H87. Sorry if it's a little long. It works for Python 2.7 and 3.3. But is this the best way to do this? In particular, is inspect.getargs the best way to get the argument names? (I don't want to use **kwargs). Also, I am using setattr to set the parameters, so the encode() method has side effects, which may not be desirable. I need bytes because I am working with binary data.


Thank you in advance!

 
Regards,
Albert-Jan


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