str(bytes) in Python 3.0

[John Roth]

On Apr 12, 8:52 am, j... at pobox.com (John J. Lee) wrote:
> Christian Heimes <li... at cheimes.de> writes:
> > Gabriel Genellina schrieb:
> >> On the last line, str(x), I would expect 'abc' - same as str(x, 'ascii')
> >> above. But I get the same as repr(x) - is this on purpose?
>
> > Yes, it's on purpose but it's a bug in your application to call str() on
> > a bytes object or to compare bytes and unicode directly. Several months
> > ago I added a bytes warning option to Python. Start Python as  "python
> > -bb" and try it again. ;)
>
> Why hasn't the one-argument str(bytes_obj) been designed to raise an
> exception in Python 3?
>
> John

Because it's a fundamental rule that you should be able to call str()
on any object and get a sensible result.

The reason that calling str() on a bytes object returns a bytes
literal rather than an unadorned character string is that there are no
default encodings or decodings: there is no way of determining what
the corresponding string should be.

John Roth