On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 10:08 PM, Helmut Jarausch <jarau...@igpm.rwth-aachen.de> wrote: > For me it's not funny, at all.
His description "funny" was in reference to the fact that you described this as a bug. This is a heavily-used mature language; bugs as fundamental as you imply are unlikely to exist (consequences of design decisions there will be, but not outright bugs, usually); extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. > Whenever Python3 encounters a bytestring it needs an encoding to convert it to > a string. If I feed a list of bytestrings or a list of list of bytestrings to > 'str' , etc, it should use the encoding for each bytestring component of the > given data structure. > > How can I convert a data strucure of arbitrarily complex nature, which > contains > bytestrings somewhere, to a string? Okay, now we're getting somewhere. What you really should be doing is not transforming the whole structure, but explicitly transforming each part inside it. I recommend you stop fighting the language and start thinking about your data as either *bytes* or *characters* and using the appropriate data types (bytes or str) everywhere. You'll then find that it makes perfect sense to explicitly translate (en/decode) from one to another, but it doesn't make sense to encode a list in UTF-8 or decode a dictionary from Latin-1. > This problem has arisen while converting a working Python2 script to > Python3.3. > Since Python2 doesn't have bytestrings it just works. Actually it does; it just calls them "str". And there's a Unicode string type, called "unicode", which is (more or less) the thing that Python 3 calls "str". You may be able to do some kind of recursive cast that, in one sweep of your data structure, encodes all str objects into bytes using a given encoding (or the reverse thereof). But I don't think this is the best way to do things. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
