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Re: API design for Python 2 / 3 compatibility

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On 04/13/2013 09:36 AM, Stefan Schwarzer wrote:
> * Approach 2
>
>    When opening remote text files for reading, ftputil will
>    always return unicode strings from `read(line/s)`,
>    regardless of whether it runs under Python 2 or Python 3.
>
>      Pro: Uniform API, independent on underlying Python
>      version.
>
>      Pro: Supporting a single API will result in cleaner code
>      in ftputil than when supporting different APIs (see
>      above).
>
>      Con: This approach might break some code which expects
>      the returned strings under Python 2 to be byte strings.
>
>      Con: Developers who only use Python 2 might be confused
>      if ftputil returns unicode strings from `read(line/s)`
>      since this behavior doesn't match files opened with
>      `open` in Python 2.
>
> Which approach do you recommend and why do you prefer that
> approach?

Approach 2, because it is much saner to deal with unicode inside the program, and only switch back to some kind of 
encoding when writing to files/pipes/etc.  Since you are going to support python 3 as well you can bump the major 
version number and note the backward incompatibility.

--
~Ethan~

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Thread

API design for Python 2 / 3 compatibility Stefan Schwarzer <sschwarzer@sschwarzer.net> - 2013-04-13 18:36 +0200
  Re: API design for Python 2 / 3 compatibility Terry Jan Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> - 2013-04-13 13:32 -0400
  Re: API design for Python 2 / 3 compatibility Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us> - 2013-04-13 11:03 -0700
  Re: API design for Python 2 / 3 compatibility Stefan Schwarzer <sschwarzer@sschwarzer.net> - 2013-04-14 13:11 +0200

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