Mailing List Archive: Python: Dev

'text' mode rears its ugly head again

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janssen at parc

Sep 16, 2007, 4:01 PM

Post #1 of 4 (386 views)
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'text' mode rears its ugly head again

I've checked in the asyncore SSL patch, and the Windows buildbots are
failing on the HTTPS test. I believe it's due to this insane
differentiation between between text files and binary files, a bad
idea introduced by Windows and perpetuated (apparently) by Python. I
can't believe this wasn't eliminated in py3k!

Anyway, I think what's going on is that the two data blobs the test
compares, one read from a file opened with "open(filename, 'r')", and
the other a data stream read from an HTTP response "file" returned
from urllib.urlopen(), have different line-endings. Of course, this
only matters on Windows; on UNIX, the faux differentiation doesn't
exist.

Bill

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janssen at parc

Sep 16, 2007, 5:16 PM

Post #2 of 4 (356 views)
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Re: 'text' mode rears its ugly head again [In reply to]

> I've checked in the asyncore SSL patch, and the Windows buildbots are
> failing on the HTTPS test.

Fixed.

Bill
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ncoghlan at gmail

Sep 17, 2007, 3:53 AM

Post #3 of 4 (349 views)
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Re: 'text' mode rears its ugly head again [In reply to]

Bill Janssen wrote:
> I've checked in the asyncore SSL patch, and the Windows buildbots are
> failing on the HTTPS test. I believe it's due to this insane
> differentiation between between text files and binary files, a bad
> idea introduced by Windows and perpetuated (apparently) by Python. I
> can't believe this wasn't eliminated in py3k!

The binary/text distinction is being increased in Py3k rather than
reduced (the API for binary files uses bytes, the API for text files
uses Unicode strings).

Cheers,
Nick.

--
Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan [at] gmail | Brisbane, Australia
---------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.boredomandlaziness.org
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janssen at parc

Sep 17, 2007, 11:08 AM

Post #4 of 4 (352 views)
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Re: 'text' mode rears its ugly head again [In reply to]

> > differentiation between between text files and binary files, a bad
> > idea introduced by Windows and perpetuated (apparently) by Python. I
> > can't believe this wasn't eliminated in py3k!
>
> The binary/text distinction is being increased in Py3k rather than
> reduced (the API for binary files uses bytes, the API for text files
> uses Unicode strings).

Actually, it's not so much the differentiation that bothers me, as it
is the default of assuming "text". I think the default should be
"binary", and getting the file in "text" mode should require extra
effort. It should be 'rt', not 'rb' -- an extra qualifier for text
mode, not for binary mode. That would eliminate a lot of the little
bugs like this one that crop up in ports to the ineffable assemblage
that is Windows.

Bill
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