Terry J. Reedy added the comment: The surrogate escape approach embodies the 3.x recommendation: decode bytes to strings, manipulate strings, encode strings to bytes. It also makes it possible to wrap the existing context/unified_diff functions, without touching them, with a simple 12 line function. Function bytes_diff avoids the complexities of mixing and unmixing strings and bytes that remain in Greg's latest patch.
I recommend the following: replace the simple test in the attached bytes_diff.py with Greg's unittest-based tests and adjust the __name__ == '__main__' incantation accordingly. Next upload to pypi to make it available to all 3.1-3.3 users. Then, after some minimal field testing, add the utility wrapper function to 3.4 difflib. These steps would make moot for difflib the sub-issue of whether the 3.x design is a bug fixable in bugfix releases. We could even add a reference to the pypi module in the 3.2 and 3.3 docs. ---------- Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file29493/bytes_diff.py _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue17445> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
