On Wed, 28 Mar 2012 11:36:10 -0400, Ross Ridge 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.
You don't know that. They might be stored as a tree, or a rope, or some even more complex data structure. In fact, in Python, they are stored as an object. But even if they were stored as a simple series of bytes, you don't know what bytes they are. That is an implementation detail of the particular Python build being used, and since Python doesn't give direct access to memory (at least not in pure Python) there's no way to retrieve those bytes using Python code. Saying that strings are stored in memory as bytes is no more sensible than saying that dicts are stored in memory as bytes. Yes, they are. So what? Taken out of context in a running Python interpreter, those bytes are pretty much meaningless. > 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. The right way to convert bytes to strings, and vice versa, is via encoding and decoding operations. What the OP is asking for is as silly as somebody asking to turn a float 1.3792 into a string without calling str() or any equivalent float->string conversion. They're both made up of bytes, right? Yeah, they are. So what? Even if you do a hex dump of float 1.3792, the result will NOT be the string "1.3792". And likewise, even if you somehow did a hex dump of the memory representation of a string, the result will NOT be the equivalent sequence of bytes except *maybe* for some small subset of possible strings. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
