R. David Murray wrote: > On Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:54:09 -0400, Steve Holden <st...@holdenweb.com> wrote: >> A.M. Kuchling wrote: >>> But should mailboxes really be opened in a UTF-8 encoding, or should >>> they be treated as 7-bit text? I'll have to think about this. >> Neither! You can't open them as 7-bit text, because real-world email >> does contain bytes whose ordinal value exceeds 127. You can't open them >> using a text encoding because theoretically there might be ASCII headers >> that indicate that parts of the content are in specific character sets >> or encodings. >> >> If only we had a data structure that easily allowed us to manipulate >> 8-bit characters ... > > email6 *will* handle this use case. When it exists :) But note that it > is *not* just a matter of easily handling 8 bit characters. There are > a whole bunch of algorithms needed for interpreting that 7 and 8 bit data. > All the info is there in the email headers, but being able to do string > operations on 8 bit byte strings doesn't get you the answers you need > by itself. > > It really is the case that the Python3 bytes/unicode split forces us > to redo most of the algorithms so that they handle bytes and text > *correctly*. This isn't a trivial undertaking, but the end result > will be well worth it. > I completely agree. The unusual thing here is that I of all people should find himself running into these issues, since my use of Python is normally pretty conservative. Since the course I am currently writing is already overdue I have to find answers now to problems that were present in the initial 3.0 release and have not received much attention since.
You know that I support your work to revise the email package. I hope that we can eventually have it incorporate mailbox readers as well. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 See Python Video! http://python.mirocommunity.org/ Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/ UPCOMING EVENTS: http://holdenweb.eventbrite.com/ "All I want for my birthday is another birthday" - Ian Dury, 1942-2000 _______________________________________________ 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
