Re: [PATCH] python: add bindings for notmuch_message_get_propert(y/ies)

[Floris Bruynooghe <flub@devork.be>]

Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> writes:

> On Tue 2017-11-28 23:46:11 +0100, Ruben Pollan wrote:
>> Message.get_property (prop) returns a string with the value of the property and
>> Message.get_properties (prop, exact=False) returns a list [(key, value)]
>
> This looks like a sensible approach to me.  I'd be curious to hear what
> others think of this.
>
> In considering the API design space here, it occurs to me that it might
> be more pythonic for get_properties to return a dict like:

I would probably model properties as a dictionary in notdb, making this
a collections.abc.MutableMapping implementation with a .get_all(prop)
method inspired from the stdlib email.message package.  This kind of
also implies making properties access a property rather then a method
call:

msg.properties['prop'] = 'foo'
msg.properties['prop'] = 'bar'
msg.properties['prop'] == 'foo'  # pot luck
msg.properties.get_all('prop') == {'foo', 'bar'}  # properties are unsorted are they?

This also has the binary question problem, is this returned as bytes or
as str?  Current Python bindings seem to go for .decode('utf-8',
errors='ignore') afaik which is somewhat lossy.


Cheers,
Floris