Thomas Wouters wrote: > > The encoding of network streams or files may be > entirely unknown beforehand, and depend on the content: a content-encoding, > a <META EQUIV> HTML tag. Will bytes-strings get string methods for easy > searching of content descriptors?
Seems to me this is a case where you want to be able to change encodings in the middle of reading the stream. You start off reading the data as ascii, and once you've figured out the encoding, you switch to that and carry on reading. Are there any plans to make it possible to change the encoding of a text file object on the fly like this? If that would be awkward, maybe file objects themselves shouldn't be where the decoding occurs, but decoders should be separate objects that wrap byte streams. Under that model, opentext(filename, encoding) would be a factory function that did something like codecs.streamdecoder(encoding, openbinary(filename)) Having codecs be stream filters might be a good idea anyway, since then you could use them to wrap anything that can be treated as a stream of bytes (sockets, some custom object in your program, etc.), you could create pipelines of encoders and decoders, etc. -- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | Carpe post meridiam! | Christchurch, New Zealand | (I'm not a morning person.) | [EMAIL PROTECTED] +--------------------------------------+ _______________________________________________ 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
