>
> [...]
>
>
>> Maybe readdir should in fact return a raw bytestring as advertised in the
>> documentation
>> http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.3/stdlib/io-network/?highlight=readdir#Base.readdir
>>
>
> A "ByteString" in Julia is just an alias for Union(ASCIIString,UTF8String)
> — i.e. a string where the code units are bytes — so it is doing what it is
> documented as doing. (And as I mentioned, in the future ASCIIString will
> probably disappear and it will just be UTF8String.) There is no other "raw
> bytestring" type.
>
> It sounds like you don't want a "string" at all, you just want an array of
> bytes, i.e. a Vector{Uint8}.
>
I thought that was what a bytestring was, my bad.
> But I tend to think it is better and more convenient to work with the data
> as a UTF8String and have it display sensibly 99.99...% of the time, and
> work with string operations like concatenation, even if you occasionally
> display mojibake in rare cases.
>
Probably right if the mutations for adding extensions etc are not
conveniently available with Vector{uint8}.
Cheers
Lex
