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From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
Subject: Re: using binary in python
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2015 22:04:26 +1100
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On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 9:56 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> wrote:
> One of the principal UNIX innovations was to see files as simple byte
> sequences. The operating system would place no semantics on the meaning
> or structure of the bytes.

And you also want to see those files as containing "plain text",
right? Unfortunately, those two goals are in conflict. Either a file
is nothing but bytes, or it contains text in some encoding. From the
file system and operating system's points of view, the files are
indeed nothing but bytes; but from the application's point of view,
text is text and bytes is bytes. In Python, a text file is opened with
a specific encoding, and Python handles the encode/decode steps.

ChrisA