Aw: Re: Python 3 how to convert a list of bytes objects to a list of strings?

[Richard Damon]

On 8/28/20 7:50 AM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:
>>> No interpreation requires, since parsing failed. Then you can start
>>> dealing with these exceptions. _Do not_ write unparsable messages into
>>> an mbox!
>>>
>> Maybe I shouldn't but Python 2 has been managing to do so for several
>> years without any issues.
> I am inclined to congratulate you on that sheer amount of luck. I don't
> believe there were no issues because everything worked just right under
> py2 but rather because py2 cared less than py3 does now.
>
>> Are we saying that Python 3 really can't be made to handle things
>> 'tolerantly' like Python 2 used to?
> It sure should be possible but it will require *explicit* en/decode()s in
> more places than before because AFAICT there's less impliciteness as to
> which encoding to apply (regardless of whether it applies).
>
> Karsten
>
>
>
This might be one of the cases where Python 2's lack handling of string
vs bytes was an advantage.

If he was just scanning the message for specific ASCII strings, then not
getting the full message decoded write is unlikely to have been causing
problems.

Python2 handled that sort of case quite easily. Python 3 on the other
hand, will have issue converting the byte message to a string, since
there isn't a single encoding that you could use for all of it all the
time. This being 'fussier' does make sure that the program is handling
all the text 'properly', and would be helpful if some of the patterns
being checked for contained 'extended' (non-ASCII) characters.

One possible solution in Python3 is to decode the byte string using an
encoding that allows all 256 byte values, so it won't raise any encoding
errors, just give your possibly non-sense characters for non-ASCII text.

-- 
Richard Damon