[Python-Dev] Re: [XML-SIG] printing Unicode xml to StringIO

[Martin v. Loewis]

> Unicode support in cStringIO would require a new implementation
> since the machinery uses raw byte buffers.

Not necessarily. You could add a flag saying that whether those bytes
represent Unicode strings or not. If they do, you pick an encoding of
your choice (perhaps unicode-internal), and convert the existing bytes
to that encoding on first sighting of a Unicode string (assuming that
everything so far is in the system encoding). When returning the bytes
to the user, you build a Unicode object if the flag is set.

Of course, you'd still have to touch every method, to analyse the
flag...

Regards,
Martin