Such languages do not have strings. Definitionally a string is a sequence of characters, and more than 256 characters exist. A byte sequence is just an encoding; if you are working with that encoding directly and have to do the interpretation yourself, you are not using a string.
But if you do want a sequence of bytes for whatever reason, you can trivially obtain that in any version of Python.
Heh. It always starts this way... then they confidently send me something that breaks on testing it, then half a dozen more iterations, then "python2 is doing the wrong thing" or, "I could get this working but it isn't worth the effort" but sure, let's do this one more time. Could be they were all missing something obvious - wouldn't know, I avoid python personally, apart from when necessary like with LLM glue. https://pastebin.com/j4Lzb5q1
This is a script created by someone on #nethack a long time ago. It works great with other things as well like old BBS games. It was intended to transparently rewrite single byte encodings to multibyte with an optional conversion array.
> then they confidently send me something that breaks on testing it, then half a dozen more iterations, then "python2 is doing the wrong thing or, 'I could get this working but it isn't worth the effort'"
It almost works as-is in my testing. (By the way, there's a typo in the usage message.) Here is my test process:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import random, sys, time
def out(b):
# ASCII 0..7 for the second digit of the color code in the escape sequence
color = random.randint(48, 55)
sys.stdout.buffer.write(bytes([27, 91, 51, color, 109, b]))
sys.stdout.flush()
for i in range(32, 256):
out(i)
time.sleep(random.random()/5)
while True:
out(random.randint(32, 255))
time.sleep(0.1)
(My initial version of this didn't flush the output, which mistakenly lead me to try a bunch of unnecessary things in the main script.)
After fixing the `print` calls, the only thing I was forced to change (although I would do the code differently overall) is the output step:
# sys.stdout.write(out.encode("UTF-8"))
sys.stdout.buffer.write(out.encode("UTF-8"))
sys.stdout.flush()
There's a warning that `bufsize=1` no longer actually means a byte buffer of size 1 for reading (instead it's magically interpreted as a request for line buffering), but this didn't cause a failure when I tried it. (And setting the size to e.g. `2` didn't break things, either.)
I also tried having my test process read from standard input; the handling of ctrl-C and ctrl-D seems to be a bit different (and in general, setting up a Python process to read unbuffered bytes from stdin isn't the most fun thing), but I generally couldn't find any issues here, either. Which is to say, the problems there are in the test process, not in `ibmfilter`. The input is still forwarded to, and readable from, the test process via the `Popen` object. And any problems of this sort are definitely still fixable, as demonstrated by the fact that `curses` is still in the standard library.
Of course, keys in the `special` mapping need to be defined as bytes literals now. Although that could trivially be adapted if you insist.
My experience personally with python3 (and repeated interactions with about a dozen python programmers, including core contributors) is that python3 does not let you trivially work with streams of bytes, esp if you need to do character set conversions, since a tiny python2 script that I have used for decades for conversion of character streams in terminals has proved to be repeated unportable to python3. The last attempt was much larger, still failed, and they thought they could probably do it, but it would require far more code and was not worth their effort.
I'll probably just use rust for that script if python2 ever gets dropped by my distro. Reminds me of https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2020/01/13/mercurial%27s-journ...