Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info>: > Incorrect. Linux presents data as text all the time. Look at the prompt: > its treated as text, not numbers.
Of course there is a textual human interface. However, from the point of view of virtually every OS component, it's bytes. > Consider: > > [steve@ando ~]$ echo -e '\x41\x42\x43' > ABC "echo" doesn't know it's emitting text. It would be perfectly happy to emit binary gibberish. The output goes to the pty which doesn't care about the textual interpretation, either. Finally, the terminal (emulation program) translates the incoming bytes to textual glyphs to the best of its capabilities. Anyway, what interests me mostly is that I routinely build programs and systems that talk to each other over files, pipes, sockets and devices. I really need to micromanage that data. I'm fine with encoding text if that's the suitable interpretation. I just think Python is overreaching by making the text interpretation the default for the standard streams and files and guessing the correct encoding. Note that subprocess.Popen() wisely assumes binary pipes. Unfortunately the subprocess might be a python program that opens the standard streams in the text mode... Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
