[Python-Dev] issue2180 and using 'tokenize' with Python 3 'str's

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> I certainly wouldn't be opposed to an API that accepts a string as well
> though.

Notice that this can't really work for Python 2 source code (but of
course, it doesn't need to).

In Python 2, if you have a string literal in the source code, you need
to know the source encoding in order to get the bytes *back*. Now,
if you parse a Unicode string as source code, and it contains byte
string literals, you wouldn't know what encoding to apply.

Fortunately, Python 3 byte literals ban non-ASCII literal characters,
so assuming an ASCII-compatible encoding for the original source is
fairly safe.

Regards,
Martin