On Thu, Jan 09, 2014 at 05:11:06PM +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> On 9 January 2014 10:07, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> > So, if what you want is to parse text and not get gibberish, you need to
> > *tell* Python what the encoding is. That's a brute fact of the world of
> > text in computing.
>
> Set the mode to "rb", process it as binary. Done.
A nice point, but really, you lose a lot by doing so. Even simple things
like the ability to write:
if word[0] == 'X'
instead you have to write things like:
if word[0:1] = b'X'
if chr(word[0]) == 'X'
if word[0] == ord('X')
if word[0] == 0x58
(pick the one that annoys you the least). And while bytes objects
do have a surprising (to me) number of string-ish methods, like
upper(), there are a few missing, like format() and isnumeric(). So it's
not quite as straightforward as "done". If it were, we wouldn't need
text strings :-)
--
Steven
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