bytes vs. characters [LWN.net]

bytes vs. characters

Posted Apr 20, 2015 7:59 UTC (Mon) by zyga (subscriber, #81533)
In reply to: bytes vs. characters by mathstuf
Parent article: Report from the Python Language Summit

You don't. There's no specification for putting random bytes in json.

At this time you just generate a stream of bytes (not python bytes, just bytes) that has some meaning that is only sensible to you and whoever consumes your byte stream. It's not json.

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bytes vs. characters

Posted Apr 20, 2015 11:43 UTC (Mon) by Jonno (guest, #49613) [Link] (3 responses)

> You don't. There's no specification for putting random bytes in json.
Actually there is, it is called an "array of numbers", ie [ 97, 114, 114, 97, 121, 32, 111, 102, 32, 110, 117, 109, 98, 101, 114, 115, 0 ]

bytes vs. characters

Posted Apr 20, 2015 12:21 UTC (Mon) by bcopeland (subscriber, #51750) [Link]

For those, like me, who have a defect where they cannot resist converting ascii-valued hex or decimal numbers into their chr() equivalent, it all checks out.

bytes vs. characters

Posted Apr 20, 2015 13:19 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

The problem is that "no" implementations do this :( . Ruby's libraries (or at least whatever GitLab uses) will happily make non-utf-8 strings in the JSON it exports. And Python2 will happily import it as a str object. There is *lots* of code that will need changing for stricter parsers/generators.

bytes vs. characters

Posted Apr 21, 2015 4:12 UTC (Tue) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link]

Go's JSON package does use those number arrays when appropriate.