Ben wrote: > Is the following a known bug? > > [temp]$ python -U > Python 2.4.4 (#1, Oct 23 2006, 13:58:18) > [GCC 4.1.1 20061011 (Red Hat 4.1.1-30)] on linux2 > Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>>> import random > Traceback (most recent call last): > File "<stdin>", line 1, in ? > File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/random.py", line 834, in ? > _inst = Random() > File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/random.py", line 94, in __init__ > self.seed(x) > File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/random.py", line 108, in seed > a = long(_hexlify(_urandom(16)), 16) > File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/os.py", line 723, in urandom > bytes += read(_urandomfd, n - len(bytes)) > UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x97 in position > 0: ordinal not in range(128)
It's unsurprising, certainly. It's not a bug in 2.4, though. -U is for experimentation only, not for actual use. Python will change to only using Unicode strings in 3.0, but not before then. Python 3.0 will add a bytes type to replace non-text strings like those read from /dev/urandom in that piece of code. os.urandom() and the random module will have to be modified to use it instead of a string. Looking at the Python 3.0 branch, I see that this hasn't quite happened, yet. -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
