On 14/05/2020 21.12, Thiago Macieira wrote:
On Thursday, 14 May 2020 07:41:45 PDT Marc Mutz via Development wrote:
Also, given a function like
setFoo(const QByteArray &);
what does this actually expect? An UTF-8 string? A local 8-bit string?
An octet stream? A Latin-1 string? QByteArray is the jack of all these,
master of none.
Like that, it's just "array of bytes of an arbitrary encoding (or none)".
There's still a reason to have QByteArray and it'll need to exist in
networking and file I/O code. That means the string classes, if any, need to
be convertible to QByteArray anyway.
I think we can learn from Python 3 here... QByteArray should go the way
of QStringList, i.e. yes, it *should* be a QVector<byte>. Like
QVector<QString>, it might (should) have additional methods, such as
explicit conversion to/from QString (a la Python's encode/decode), but
it should *not* have string-like manipulation (e.g. toUpper).
So, assuming the premise that QByteArray should not be string-ish
anymore, what do we want to have as the result type of QString::toUtf8()
and QString::toLatin1()? Do we really want mere bytes?
Yes. Maybe. Again, this is how Python 3 works.
It might make sense to have a QUtf8String class, but that should be
distinct from, and not implicitly constructible from, QByteArray a.k.a.
QVector<byte>. (Implicit conversion *to* QByteArray might be okay.)
(BTW, is 'byte' QByte or std::byte? Can we possibly achieve the latter?)
--
Matthew
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