On Thursday, September 18, 2014 9:38:00 AM UTC-7, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 2:19 AM, <chris.bar...@noaa.gov> wrote:
> > So: there are way too many ways to open a simple file to read or write a
> > bit of text (or binary):
> > open()
>
> Personally, I'd just use this, all the way through - and not importing
>
> from io, either. But others may disagree.
well the trick there is that it's a serious trick to work with non-ascii
compatible text files if you do that...
> Be clear about what's text and what's bytes, everywhere. When you do
> make the jump to Py3, you'll have to worry about text files vs binary
> files, and if you need to support Windows as well as Unix, you need to
> get that right anyway, so just make sure you get the two straight.
yup -- I've always emphasized that point, but from a py2 perspective (and with
the built in open() file object, what is a utf-8 encoded file? text or bytes?
It's bytes -- and you need to do the decoding yourself. Why make people do
that?
In the past, I started with open(), ignored unicode for a while then when I
introduced unicode, I pointed them to codecs.open() (I hadn't discovered
io.open yet ). Maybe I should stick with this approach, but it feels like a bad
idea.
> Save yourself a lot of trouble later on by keeping
> the difference very clear.
exactly -- but it's equally clear, and easier and more robust to have two types
of files: binary and text, where text requires a known encoding. Rather than
three types: binary, ascii text and encoded text, which is really binary, which
you can then decode to make text....
Think of somethign as simple and common as loping through the lines in a file!
> And you can save yourself some more
> conversion trouble by tossing this at the top of every .py file you
>
> write:
>
> from __future__ import print_function, division, unicode_literals
yup -- I've been thinking of recommending that to my students as well --
particularly unicode_literal
> But mainly, just go with the simple open() call and do the job the
> easiest way you can. And go Py3 as soon as you can, because ...
A discussion for another thread....
Thanks,
-Chris
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