[QScintilla] Using python strings with SendScintilla

[Baz Walter]

Phil Thompson wrote:
  > So you are using SendScintilla() to bypass the immutability of Python
> strings? In that case you deserve all you get.

i had a hunch that you might say something like this :)

of course, i don't *want* to use python strings in this way. it's just 
that, AFAICT, that's how the SendScintilla api works - it requires a 
string buffer to be passed in. if there's another way, please let me 
know, because i'd be more than happy to use it!

> If speed is a real problem (and not premature optimisation) then a better
> solution would be to implement a new method (stripTrailingSpaces()) at the
> C++ level.

a stripTrailingSpaces method would be nice, but what i would really like 
is a more general method that simply returned the undecoded bytes (as a 
str/bytes object for the python bindings). there are lots of uses that i 
could make of this that aren't really optimisations. they're more to do 
with working in a more pythonic way - it is just more natural for me to 
work directly with python strings, particularly as i am making a lot of 
use of python's regexps and io (on unix). the speed issues arise with 
larger documents (e.g. multi-megabyte xml files) where some operations 
that would normally take fractions of second can take several tens of 
seconds. this obviously hurts the usuablility of the program a lot if 
the operation is occuring repeatedly (like stripping trailing spaces 
when saving the document).

i hope this makes it clearer what i'm asking for and why.

Regards
Baz Walter