On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 12:00 PM Kyle Stanley <aeros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On a related note though, I'm not a fan of this behavior:
> >>> str(b'\xc3\xa1')
> "b'\\xc3\\xa1'"
>
> Passing a bytes object to str() without specifying an encoding seems like a
> mistake, I honestly don't see how this ("b'\\xc3\\xa1'") would even be useful
> in any capacity. I would expect this to instead raise a TypeError, similar to
> passing a string to bytes() without specifying an encoding:
> >>> bytes('รก')
> ...
> TypeError: string argument without an encoding
>
> I'd much prefer to see something like this:
> >>> str(b'\xc3\xa1')
> ...
> TypeError: bytes argument without an encoding
>
> Is there some use case for returning "b'\\xc3\\xa1'" from this operation that
> I'm not seeing? To me, it seems equally, if not more confusing and pointless
> than returning an empty string from str(errors='strict') or some other
> combination of *errors* and *encoding* kwargs without passing an object.
>
ANY object can be passed to str() in order to get some sort of valid
printable form. The awkwardness comes from the fact that str()
performs double duty - it's both "give me a printable form of this
object" and "decode these bytes into text". With an actual bytes
object, I always prefer b.decode(...) to str(b, encoding=...). But the
one-arg form of str() needs to be able to represent a bytes object in
some way, just as it can represent an int, a Fraction, or a list.
ChrisA
_______________________________________________
Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org
To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/
Message archived at
https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/ZP7SXIDQOQVKUF66NVZPS3O4FN3A6DWA/
Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
