[Python-Dev] Readability of hex strings (Was: Use of coding cookie in 3.x stdlib)

[anatoly techtonik]

I find "\xXX\xXX\xXX\xXX..." notation for binary data totally
unreadable. Everybody who uses and analyses binary data is more
familiar with plain hex dumps in the form of "XX XX XX XX...".

I wonder if it is possible to introduce an effective binary string
type that will be represented as h"XX XX XX" in language syntax? It
will be much easier to analyze printed binary data and copy/paste such
data as-is from hex editors/views.

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 9:45 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> Sounds like a good idea to try to remove redundant cookies *and* to
> remove most occasional use of non-ASCII characters outside comments
> (except for unittests specifically trying to test Unicode features).
> Personally I would use \xXX escapes instead of spelling out the
> characters in shlex.py, for example.
>
> Both with or without the coding cookies, many ways of displaying text
> files garble characters outside the ASCII range, so it's better to
> stick to ASCII as much as possible.
>
> --Guido
>
> On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 1:21 AM, Alexander Belopolsky
> <alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I was looking at the inspect module and noticed that it's source
>> starts with "# -*- coding: iso-8859-1 -*-".   I have checked and there
>> are no non-ascii characters in the file.   There are several other
>> modules that still use the cookie:
>>
>> Lib/ast.py:# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>> Lib/getopt.py:# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>> Lib/inspect.py:# -*- coding: iso-8859-1 -*-
>> Lib/pydoc.py:# -*- coding: latin-1 -*-
>> Lib/shlex.py:# -*- coding: iso-8859-1 -*-
>> Lib/encodings/punycode.py:# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>> Lib/msilib/__init__.py:# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>> Lib/sqlite3/__init__.py:#-*- coding: ISO-8859-1 -*-
>> Lib/sqlite3/dbapi2.py:#-*- coding: ISO-8859-1 -*-
>> Lib/test/bad_coding.py:# -*- coding: uft-8 -*-
>> Lib/test/badsyntax_3131.py:# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>>
>> I understand that coding: utf-8 is strictly redundant in 3.x.  There
>> are cases such as Lib/shlex.py where using encoding other than utf-8
>> is justified.  (See
>> http://svn.python.org/view?view=rev&revision=82560).  What are the
>> guidelines for other cases?  Should redundant cookies be removed?
>> Since not all editors respect the  -*- cookie, I think the answer
>> should be "yes" particularly when the cookie is setting encoding other
>> than utf-8.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Python-Dev mailing list
>> Python-Dev at python.org
>> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
>> Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/guido%40python.org
>>
>
>
>
> --
> --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
> _______________________________________________
> Python-Dev mailing list
> Python-Dev at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
> Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/techtonik%40gmail.com
>