file.seek() and file.tell() look inconsistent to me

[Marco Buttu]

Hi all,

if I open a file in text mode, do you know why file.seek() returns the 
number of bytes, and file.tell() takes the number of bytes? I was 
expecting the number of characters, like write() does:

 >>> f = open('myfile', 'w')
 >>> f.write('aè')
2

It seems to me not consistent, and maybe could also be error prone:

 >>> f.seek(2)
2
 >>> f.write('c')
1
 >>> f.close()
 >>> open('myfile').read()
    ...
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xc3...


-- 
Marco Buttu