[Python-Dev] Dropping bytes "support" in json

[Antoine Pitrou]

Hello,

We're in the process of forward-porting the recent (massive) json updates to
3.1, and we are also thinking of dropping remnants of support of the bytes type
in the json library (in 3.1, again). This bytes support almost didn't work at
all, but there was a lot of C and Python code for it nevertheless. We're also
thinking of dropping the "encoding" argument in the various APIs, since it is
useless.

Under the new situation, json would only ever allow str as input, and output str
as well. By posting here, I want to know whether anybody would oppose this
(knowing, once again, that bytes support is already broken in the current py3k
trunk).

The bug entry is: http://bugs.python.org/issue4136

Regards

Antoine.