"John Roth" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | On Apr 12, 8:52 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (John J. Lee) wrote: | > Christian Heimes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: | > > Gabriel Genellina schrieb: | > >> On the last line, str(x), I would expect 'abc' - same as str(x, 'ascii') | > >> above. But I get the same as repr(x) - is this on purpose? | > | > > Yes, it's on purpose but it's a bug in your application to call str() on | > > a bytes object or to compare bytes and unicode directly. Several months | > > ago I added a bytes warning option to Python. Start Python as "python | > > -bb" and try it again. ;) | > | > Why hasn't the one-argument str(bytes_obj) been designed to raise an | > exception in Python 3? | > | > John | | Because it's a fundamental rule that you should be able to call str() | on any object and get a sensible result. | | The reason that calling str() on a bytes object returns a bytes | literal rather than an unadorned character string is that there are no | default encodings or decodings: there is no way of determining what | the corresponding string should be.
In having a double meaning, str is much like type. Type(obj) echoes the existing class of the object. Type(o,p,q) attempts to construct a new class. Similarly, Str(obj) gives a string representing the obj (which, for a string, is the string;-). Str(obj,obj2) attemps to construct a new string. tjr -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
