[Python-3000] Does bytes() need to support bytes(<str>, <encoding>)?

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Aug 27, 2007, at 4:38 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> I'm still working on stricter enforcement of the "don't mix str and
> bytes" rule. I'm finding a lot of trivial problems, which are
> relatively easy to fix but time-consuming.
>
> While doing this, I realize there are two idioms for converting a str
> to bytes: s.encode(e) or bytes(s, e). These have identical results. I
> think we can't really drop s.encode(), for symmetry with b.decode().
> So is bytes(s, e) redundant?

I think it might be.  I've hit this several time while working on the  
email package and it's certainly confusing.  I've also run into  
situations where I did not like the default e=utf-8 argument for bytes 
().  Sometimes I am able to work around failures by doing this: "bytes 
(ord(c) for c in s)" until I found "bytes(s, 'raw-unicode-escape')"

I'm probably doing something really dumb to need that, but it does  
get me farther along.  I do intend to go back and look at those  
(there are only a few) when I get the rest of the package working again.

Getting back to the original question, I'd like to see "bytes(s, e)"  
dropped in favor of "s.encode(e)" and maayyybeee (he says bracing for  
the shout down) "bytes(s)" to be defined as "bytes(s, 'raw-unicode- 
escape')".

- -Barry


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