Changes ahead for Python

Changes ahead for Python

Posted Sep 20, 2007 17:19 UTC (Thu) by larryr (guest, #4030)
In reply to: Changes ahead for Python by walters
Parent article: Changes ahead for Python

The Py3k solution is to separate strings [...] and byte-strings [...] str and bytes

This is wrong as far as I can see; quoting from the page:

There is only one string type; its name is str but its behavior and implementation are more like unicode in 2.x. PEP 358: There is a new type, bytes, to represent binary data

Which makes sense, because what the heck would a byte-string be? There are strings which contain Unicode, and byte *arrays* (calling them strings just leads to confusion).

To me, the array in this case comprises a series of 8-bit characters, which to me is a string, and to me a "byte string" is a reasonable and useful thing to call it; it is a string whose (character) elements each have a size of one byte.

Larry

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