[Python-Dev] email package status in 3.X

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jun 22, 2010, at 08:03 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

>On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 6:16 AM, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
>> True, but making it a separate type with a required encoding gets rid of the
>> magical "I don't know" - the "I don't know" encoding is just a plain old
>> bytes object.
>
>So, to boil down the ebytes idea, it is basically a request for a
>second string type that holds an octet stream plus an encoding name,
>rather than a Unicode character stream. Calling it "ebytes" seems to
>emphasise the wrong parallel in that case (you have a 'str' object
>with a different internal structure, not any kind of bytes object).
>For now I'll call it an "altstr". Then the idea can be described as

Actually no.  We're introducing a second bytes type that holds an octet stream
plus an encoding name.  See the toy implementation I included in a previous
message.

As opposed to say a bytes object that represented an image, which would make
almost no sense to decode to a unicode, this ebytes type would help bridge the
gap between a pure bytes object and a pure unicode object.  It would know how
to accurately convert to a unicode (i.e. __str__()) because it would know the
encoding of the bytes.  Obviously, it could convert to a pure bytes object.
Because it can be accurately stringified, it can have the most if not all of
the str API.

-Barry
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