On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 2:36 AM, Ross Ridge <rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote: > Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: >>What is a string? It's not a series of bytes. > > Of course it is. Conceptually you're not supposed to think of it that > way, but a string is stored in memory as a series of bytes.
Note that distinction. I said that a string "is not" a series of bytes; you say that it "is stored" as bytes. > What he's asking for many not be very useful or practical, but if that's > your problem here than then that's what you should be addressing, not > pretending that it's fundamentally impossible. That's equivalent to taking a 64-bit integer and trying to treat it as a 64-bit floating point number. They're all just bits in memory, and in C it's quite easy to cast a pointer to a different type and dereference it. But a Python Unicode string might be stored in several ways; for all you know, it might actually be stored as a sequence of apples in a refrigerator, just as long as they can be referenced correctly. There's no logical Python way to turn that into a series of bytes. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
