Addition of a .= operator

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, 24 May 2023 at 08:57, Rob Cliffe <rob.cliffe at btinternet.com> wrote:
> > Do you mean "ASCII or UTF-8"? Because decoding as UTF-8 is fine with
> > ASCII (it's a superset). You should always consistently get the same
> > data type (bytes or text) based on the library you're using.
> >
> > ChrisA
> OK, bad example.  The point remains: condensing each step to a single
> chained function can come unstuck when one of the steps needs to be made
> more complicated for some reason.

That's fair. Still, I wouldn't over-complicate a piece of code "just
in case" it needs to become more complicated in the future. I'd rather
code to what's needed now, and if that's a simple "decode as UTF-8",
that's great; maybe in the future I need to cope with an insane system
like "decode line by line, attempting UTF-8 first and falling back on
Windows-1252, then rejoin the lines", and that's the time to implement
that.

(Yes, I have had to do that. Although I think I cheated and used
ISO-8859-1 instead. It was a lot easier and I didn't really care about
precise handling, so long as MOST things were readable.)

ChrisA