Daniel Stutzbach wrote: > On 6/20/07, Bill Janssen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Ah, not everyone dealing with text is dealing with line-delimited > > > text, you know... > > > > It's really the only difference between text and non-text. > > Text is a sequence of characters. Non-text is a sequence of bytes. > Characters may be multi-byte. It is no longer an ASCII world.
Yes, of course, Daniel, but I was speaking of the contents of files, and files are inherently sequences of bytes. If we are talking about some layer which interprets the contents of a file, just saying "give me N characters" isn't enough. We need to say, "N characters assuming a text encoding of M, with a normalization policy of Q, and a newline policy of R". If we don't, we can't just "read" N characters safely. So I think it's broken to put this in the TextIOBase class; instead, there should be some wrapper class that does buffering and can be configured as to (M, Q, R). Bill _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
