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0 pointsdataflow7y ago0 comments

So for example what is your rebuttal to my actual example pointing out that "a".encode('unicode_escape') returns bytes instead of strings? Why/how the heck is it even encoding anything when it never even asked me for an encoding? If for nonsensical reasons it really wants to encode things, shouldn't it at least be asking me for an encoding if it wants a "clean separation" between strings and bytes? You find Python 2's behavior of returning a string to be somehow deeply flawed but Python 3's returning of bytes to be sensible? Really? What problem are they solving here?

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3 comments · 1 top-level

lozenge7y ago· 2 in thread

Encode and decode always move between str and bytes. Otherwise you could never write a function that takes an encoding as the argument and uses it in the middle of its code (because the types of your locals would vary at runtime in incompatible ways).

What is your reason for using this obscure encoding anyway?

dataflowOP7y ago

> Encode and decode always move between str and bytes.

Yes and my entire point is that this makes zero sense when we're talking about escaping.

> What is your reason for using this obscure encoding anyway?

Seriously?

maxnoe7y ago

https://docs.python.org/3/library/codecs.html

The encoding `unicode_escape` is not about escaping unicode characters. It's about python source code. It's defined as:

> Encoding suitable as the contents of a Unicode literal in ASCII-encoded Python source code, except that quotes are not escaped.

It makes absolutely no sense to have escaped unicode characters as actual unicode string. If you really need that, a version that also works in python 2 would be:

     u'hellö'.encode('unicode_escape').decode('ascii')

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