Phillip J. Eby wrote: > I was just pointing out that since byte strings are bytes by definition, > then simply putting those bytes in a bytes() object doesn't alter the > existing encoding. So, using latin-1 when converting a string to bytes > actually seems like the the One Obvious Way to do it.
This is a misconception. In Python 2.x, the type str already *is* a bytes type. So if S is an instance of 2.x str, bytes(S) does not need to do any conversion. You don't need to assume it is latin-1: it's already bytes. > In fact, the 'encoding' argument seems useless in the case of str objects, > and it seems it should default to latin-1 for unicode objects. I agree with the former, but not with the latter. There shouldn't be a conversion of Unicode objects to bytes at all. If you want bytes from a Unicode string U, write bytes(U.encode(encoding)) Regards, Martin _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
