[Python-Dev] decoding errors when comparing strings

[Fredrik Lundh]

with the locale aware encoding mechanisms switched off
(sys.getdefaultencoding() =3D=3D "ascii"), I stumbled upon some
interesting behaviour:

first something that makes sense:

    >>> u"abc" =3D=3D "abc"
    1

    >>> u"=E5=E4=F6" =3D=3D "abc"
    0

but how about this one:

    >>> u"abc" =3D=3D "=E5=E4=F6"
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
    UnicodeError: ASCII decoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

or this one:

    >>> u"=E5=E4=F6" =3D=3D "=E5=E4=F6"
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
    UnicodeError: ASCII decoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

ignoring implementation details for a moment, is this really the
best we can do?

</F>