[Python-Dev] bytes / unicode

[Robert Collins]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 6:09 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:

>>           return constant.encode('utf-8')
>>
>> So now you can write x.split(literal_as('&', x)).
>
> This polymorphism is what we used in Python2 a lot to write
> code that works for both Unicode and 8-bit strings.
>
> Unfortunately, this no longer works as easily in Python3 due
> to the literals sometimes having the wrong type and using
> such a helper function slows things down a lot.

I didn't work in 2 either - see for instance the traceback module with
an Exception with unicode args and a non-ascii file path - the file
path is in its bytes form, the string joining logic triggers an
implicit upcast and *boom*.

> Too bad we can't add such porting enhancements to Python2 anymore

Perhaps a 'py3compat' module on pypi, with things like the py._builtin
reraise helper and so forth ?

-Rob