[Python-Dev] Python 3.x and bytes

[Greg Ewing]

Robert Collins wrote:
> urlparse converting bytes to 'str' to operate on them is
> at best a kludge - you're forcing 5 times the storage (the original
> bytes + 4 bytes-per-byte when its decoded into unicode)

That is itself an implementation detail of current Python,
though, due to it only having one internal representation of
unicode.

In principle there could be a form of str that keeps its
data encoded in latin1, in which case constructing it from
a byte string could simply involve storing a pointer to the
original bytes data.

-- 
Greg