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

[Chris Green]

Richard Damon <Richard at damon-family.org> wrote:
> 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.
> 
But this will simply get some things quite wrong and produce garbage
won't it?  Whereas Python 2 would simply scramble the odd character.

-- 
Chris Green
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