Comments on: String compatibility between Python implementations

By: Jim Baker

Jim Baker — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:31:13 +0000

@David Jones:
I’d recommend using the array module instead of jarray. The array module has two advantages: it’s standard Python, and it interoperates to/from Java array objects. Meanwhile, the jarray module is being phased out, if slowly.

By: David Jones

David Jones — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:48:26 +0000

The repr for jarray.array (in your example) suggests that array.array(’b') is compatible with jarray.array. In other words that the arrays you get out of the standard python module for making arrays (array) are in fact the same as native Java arrays. Which I was just thinking would be a nice feature for interoperability.

Do you know if that is indeed the case? Can one pass an array.array(’b') to a Java function that expects a Java array?

By: Jim Baker

Jim Baker — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:40:44 +0000

Please note that the equivalence between the str and unicode types is no longer the case with Jython 2.5. We changed this for compatibility with Python. Also, for Java integration we now convert java.lang.String to/from unicode.

However, we still use String internally to represent str, which requires 2 bytes per actual byte used. This will almost certainly be changed soon to byte[], perhaps as early as 2.5.1, so as to improve performance and reduce memory overhead.