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From: Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com>
Subject: Re: "convert" string to bytes without changing data (encoding)
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2012 06:51:11 +0100
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On Wed, 29 Aug 2012 19:39:15 -0400, Piet van Oostrum wrote:

>> Reading from stdin/a file gets you bytes, and not a string, because
>> Python cannot automagically guess what format the input is in.
>>
> Huh?

Oh, it can certainly guess (in the absence of any other information, it
uses the current locale). Whether or not that guess is correct is a
different matter.

Realistically, if you want sensible behaviour from Python 3.x, you need
to use an ISO-8859-1 locale. That ensures that conversion between str and
bytes will never fail, and an str-bytes-str or bytes-str-bytes round-trip
will pass data through unmangled.