Can I use cStringIO the same as StringIO?

Question

I did this:

import cStringIO.StringIO as StringIO

And I realize I've been using it everywhere. Is that fine? Is it treated the same as StringIO?

Answer 1

They are not the same. cStringIO doesn't correctly handle unicode characters.

>>> StringIO.StringIO().write(u'\u0080')

>>> cStringIO.StringIO().write(u'\u0080')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\x80' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Answer 2

Nor can you set attributes on a cStringIO.StringIO instance:

>>> from cStringIO import StringIO
>>> s = StringIO()
>>> s.name = 'myfile'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'cStringIO.StringO' object has no attribute 'name'

Several libraries depend on File-like objects having either a name or content_type attribute, so cStringIO.StringIO does not work in these instances.