Python 2 and 3, str and bytes compatibility

[slezica]

To make the library run under both Python versions with the same code, we need to address the str vs bytes problem.

In Python 2, bytes is an alias for str. In Python 3, bytes is a separate class. These two, despite having the same name, behave completely different: they take different arguments to construct, they return different types when indexed and str and repr don't do the same.

Possible solutions:

• Use the bytes class in future.builtins, from pip install future
• Use the six bridging library (undesireable, it cannot be exposed to the API user)

[federicobond]

When porting to Python 3 I used bytearray to get numbers when indexing bytes. It's not super clean, but it has the advantage of not cluttering the package with unnecessary dependencies.

[slezica]

We could create a blob type (avoiding bytes altogether), either by extending bytearray or imitating the python-future bytes implementation.

What do you think?

[federicobond]

Could our Buffer class fill this role? I haven't looked into it much, but it makes sense to use a single type of object for handling binary data across the codebase.

[slezica]

Buffer is mutable, itself a thin wrapper around bytearray