[Python-Dev] just say no...

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> 
> > > > Besides, the Unicode object will have a buffer containing the
> > > > <default encoding> representation of the object, which, if all goes
> > > > well, will always hold the UTF-8 value.
> > >
> > > <rant>
> > >
> > > over my dead body, that one...
> >
> > Such a buffer is needed to implement "s" and "s#" argument
> > parsing. It's a simple requirement to support those two
> > parsing markers -- there's not much to argue about, really...
> 
> why?  I don't understand why "s" and "s#" has
> to deal with encoding issues at all...
> 
> > unless, of course, you want to give up Unicode object support
> > for all APIs using these parsers.
> 
> hmm.  maybe that's exactly what I want...

If we don't add that support, lot's of existing APIs won't
accept Unicode object instead of strings. While it could be
argued that automatic conversion to UTF-8 is not transparent
enough for the user, the other solution of using str(u)
everywhere would probably make writing Unicode-aware code a
rather clumsy task and introduce other pitfalls, since str(obj)
calls PyObject_Str() which also works on integers, floats,
etc.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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