On 01/-10/-28163 01:59 PM, Ross Ridge wrote:
Steven D'Aprano<steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
The right way to convert bytes to strings, and vice versa, is via
encoding and decoding operations.
If you want to dictate to the original poster the correct way to do
things then you don't need to do anything more that. You don't need to
pretend like Chris Angelico that there's isn't a direct mapping from
the his Python 3 implementation's internal respresentation of strings
to bytes in order to label what he's asking for as being "silly".
That mapping may as well be:
def get_bytes(some_string):
import random
length = random.randint(len(some_string), 5*len(some_string))
bytes = [0] * length
for i in xrange(length):
bytes[i] = random.randint(0, 255)
return bytes
Of course this is hyperbole, but it's essentially about as much
guarantee as to what the result is.
As many others have said, the encoding isn't defined, and I would guess
varies between implementations. (E.g. if Jython and IronPython use their
host platforms' native strings, both have 16-bit chars and thus probably
use UTF-16 encoding. I am not sure what CPython uses, but I bet it's
*not* that.)
It's even guaranteed that the byte representation won't change! If
something is lazily evaluated or you have a COW string or something, the
bytes backing it will differ.
So yes, you can say that pretending there's not a mapping of strings to
internal representation is silly, because there is. However, there's
nothing you can say about that mapping.
Evan
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