[Python-3000] Immutable bytes type and dbm modules

Tue Aug 7 05:45:00 CEST 2007

> For instance, it is quite common to use integers as keys. If you are 
> inserting keys in order, it is about a hundred times faster to encode 
> the ints in big-endian byte order than than little-endian:
>> class MyIntDB(object):
> 	def __setitem__(self, key, item):
> self.db.put(struct.pack('>Q', key), serializer(item))
> def __getitem__(self, key):
> return unserializer(self.db.get(struct.pack('>Q', key)))

I guess Guido wants you to write
class MyIntDB(object):
 def __setitem__(self, key, item):
 self.db.put(struct.pack('>Q', key).encode("latin-1"),
 serializer(item))
 def __getitem__(self, key):
 return unserializer(self.db.get(
 struct.pack('>Q', key).encode("latin-1"))
here.
> How do you envision these types of tasks being accomplished with 
> unicode keys? It is conceivable that one could write a custom 
> unicode encoding that accomplishes this, convert the key to unicode, 
> and pass the custom encoding name to the constructor.

See above. It's always trivial to do that with latin-1 as the encoding
(I'm glad you didn't see that, either :-).
Regards,
Martin