Chris Angelico wrote:
> 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".
While it does make sense for str() to be able to give some form of
printable form for any object, I suppose that I just don't consider something
like this: "b'\\xc3\\xa1'" to be overly useful, at least for any practical
purposes. Can anyone think of a situation where you would want a string
representation of a bytes object instead of decoding it?
If not, I think it would be more useful for it to either:
1) Raise a TypeError, assume that the user wanted to decode the string but
forgot to specify an encoding
2) Implicitly decode the bytes object as UTF-8, assume the user meant
str(bytes_obj, encoding='utf-8')
Personally, I'm more in favor of (1) since it's much more explicit and
obvious, but I think (2) would at least be more useful than the current
behavior.
On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 8:13 PM Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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