On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 11:55 AM, Peter Kleiweg <p.c.j.klei...@rug.nl> wrote: > Stephen Hansen schreef op de 26e dag van de zomermaand van het jaar 2010: >> There were various serious problems with Python 2 which could not be fixed in >> a backwards compatible way; we've been living with them for years and years >> now, and it was decided that a single break to go back and correct them would >> be preferable to keeping them forever. >> >> From the fact that "strings" in Python 2 ended up doing double-duty as both >> octet sequences and arrays of character text, to yes the syntactical > > I have been using Python 3 for quite some time now, and this > string thing in Python 3 has caused me more headaches than it > ever did in Python 2. <snip> > Some basic text string functions seem to be working on byte > string functions as well, but sometimes they don't, and there's > no rhyme in why it does or doesn't. > > >>> 'abcd'[0] == 'abcd'[:1] > True > >>> b'abcd'[0] == b'abcd'[:1] > False > > Why????
In the bytes example, the former expression gives an integer corresponding the the value of the first byte, while the latter gives a bytes object of length 1 (this reminds me of Ruby now that I think about it). The slicing behavior of bytes takes some getting used to, but there aren't many good alternatives. Using chr() and ord() on bytes would feel a bit weird, no? Cheers, Chris -- http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
