Bengt Richter wrote: > Perhaps string equivalence in keys will be treated like numeric equivalence? > I.e., a key/name representation is established by the initial key/name > binding, but > values can be retrieved by "equivalent" key/names with different > representations > like unicode vs ascii or latin-1 etc.?
That would require that you know the encoding of a byte string; this information is not available at run-time. You could also try all possible encodings to see whether the strings are equal if you chose the right encoding for each one. This would be both expensive and unlike numeric equivalence: in numeric equivalence, you don't give a sequence of bytes all possible interpretations to find some interpretation in which they are equivalent, either. There is one special case, though: when comparing a byte string and a Unicode string, the system default encoding (i.e. ASCII) is assumed. This only really works if the default encoding really *is* ASCII. Otherwise, equal strings might not hash equal, in which case you wouldn't find them properly in a dictionary. Regards, Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
