[Python-Dev] unicode() and its error argument

[Guido van Rossum]

> The unicode() builtin accepts an optional third argument, errors,
> which defaults to "strict".  According to the docs if errors is set
> to "ignore", decoding errors are silently ignored.  I seem to still
> get the occasional UnicodeError exception, however.  I'm still
> trying to track down an actual example (it doesn't happen often, and
> I hadn't wrapped unicode() in a try/except statement, so all I saw
> was the error raised, not the input string value).

This is between you and MAL. :-)

> This reminds me, it occurred to me the other day that a plain text
> version of cgitb would be useful to use for non-web scripts.  You'd
> get a lot more context about the environment in which the exception
> was raised.

Not a bad idea.  I think it could live in the traceback module,
possibly as a family of functions named "fancy_traceback" and similar.
Care to do a patch?

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)