On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 5:00 AM, Ross Ridge <rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote: > Sorry, it would've been more accurate to label the flavour of kool-aid > Chris Angelico was trying to push as "it's impossible ... without > encoding": > > What is a string? It's not a series of bytes. You can't convert > it without encoding those characters into bytes in some way.
I still stand by that statement. Do you try to convert a "dictionary of filename to open file object" into a "series of bytes" inside Python? It doesn't matter that, on some level, it's *stored as* a series of bytes; the actual object *is not* a series of bytes. There is no logical equivalency, ergo it is illogical and nonsensical to expect to turn one into the other without some form of encoding. Python does include an encoding that can handle lists and dictionaries. It's called Pickle, and it returns (in Python 3) a bytes object - which IS a series of bytes. It doesn't simply return some internal representation. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
