Hi Marcus, hi Jeff, thank you for the suggestions!
I considered using the .net functions for i-o and byte arrays and decided not to. The reason: the module I am talking about is used in an environment of everyday programming, often in a quick and dirty manner. The data used are 1-byte characters and are mostly text, but with mixed in binary sections. The module users are used to treating chars as being of no special meaning. Umlauts, encodings, and the like do not need to be considered; they are interpreted elsewhere, and it is only expected that these characters are *preserved*, i.e. simply not changed.
On the other hand we need string functions like slicing, find, replace, startswith and the like for interpretating the relevant parts. Byte arrays do not fit good there, and even worse would be an environment of mixed bytes and unicode with frequent conversions. Unwanted encoding and decoding problem would probably show up. It would be somewhat confusing and it would require a too technical view in a context focused on application logic.
In the moment, I can only hope that no information is lost during the implicit conversions of file i-o. That means I hope these conversion simply add a 0-byte to every byte read in to make it unicode and only discards the 0-byte when writing to a file.
Best regards Peter _______________________________________________ Users mailing list Users@lists.ironpython.com http://lists.ironpython.com/listinfo.cgi/users-ironpython.com
