[Python-Dev] Internationalization Toolkit

[Andy Robinson]

> I say axe it and say "UTF-8" is the fixed, default
> encoding. If you want
> something else, then do that explicitly.
> 
Let me tell you why you would want to have an encoding
which can be set:

(1) sday I am on a Japanese Windows box, I have a
string called 'address' and I do 'print address'.  If
I see utf8, I see garbage.  If I see Shift-JIS, I see
the correct Japanese address.  At this point in time,
utf8 is an interchange format but 99% of the world's
data is in various native encodings.  

Analogous problems occur on input.

(2) I'm using htmlgen, which 'prints' objects to
standard output.  My web site is supposed to be
encoded in Shift-JIS (or EUC, or Big 5 for Taiwan,
etc.)  Yes, browsers CAN detect and display UTF8 but
you just don't find UTF8 sites in the real world - and
most users just don't know about the encoding menu,
and will get pissed off if they have to reach for it.

Ditto for streaming output in some protocol.

Java solves this (and we could too by hacking stdout)
using Writer classes which are created as wrappers
around an output stream and can take an encoding, but
you lose the flexibility to 'just print'.  

I think being able to change encoding would be useful.
 What I do not want is to auto-detect it from the
operating system when Python boots - that would be a
portability nightmare. 

Regards,

Andy





=====
Andy Robinson
Robinson Analytics Ltd.
------------------
My opinions are the official policy of Robinson Analytics Ltd.
They just vary from day to day.

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