Hi,

After discussing this on the python-ideas ML a bit more, this is actually a feature people want a great deal. It can't cover every use case, but to expand it further than this proposal and make it do so is way beyond the scope of this proposal.

It may not be completely useful for every protocol, but it is sufficiently useful for many people who have simpler use cases. There is no reason to prevent the addition of this feature other than what boils down to "well code will have to be written..."

I don't buy the argument that it's "outside the scope of the module" more than I think it's more "I don't like the idea of struct being used for non-fixed data." C structures support zero-terminated char arrays, and there is already a Pascal string type.

I didn't realise there'd be this much opposition to just adding two format specifiers... :/