[Python-Dev] Unicode byte order mark decoding

[Evan Jones]

On Apr 5, 2005, at 15:33, Walter Dörwald wrote:
> The stateful decoder has a little problem: At least three bytes
> have to be available from the stream until the StreamReader
> decides whether these bytes are a BOM that has to be skipped.
> This means that if the file only contains "ab", the user will
> never see these two characters.

Shouldn't the decoder be capable of doing a partial match and quitting 
early? After all, "ab" is encoded in UTF8 as <61> <62> but the BOM is 
<ef> <bb> <bf>. If it did this type of partial matching, this issue 
would be avoided except in rare situations.

> A solution for this would be to add an argument named final to
> the decode and read methods that tells the decoder that the
> stream has ended and the remaining buffered bytes have to be
> handled now.

This functionality is provided by a flush() method on similar objects, 
such as the zlib compression objects.

Evan Jones