[Python-Dev] Changes to logging

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Vinay Sajip wrote:
>>You should use sys.getdefaultencoding() for this. Python's default
>>encoding is "ascii", BTW, not "latin-1".
>>
> 
> OK, but supposing I log a message with the format string u"Marc-Andr\xe9".
> If I use "ascii" as the encoding, an exception is raised because the code
> for e-acute is > 128. How best should this situation be handled? I assumed
> that people would be using Unicode to log messages in other languages with
> accented characters etc. which are typically outside the ASCII range.

I don't know how you have implemented logging to files or stream,
but in general it's better to let the stream get the Unicode
and let it decide what to do, e.g. you could have a log file open
in 'latin-1' mode (via codecs.open()) and then see log entries
as Latin-1.

To make things a little more robust (ie. to prevent the log message
from getting lost), I'd suggest to use try: except UnicodeError:
around the log writing code. The except clause should then encode
the log message to UTF-8 and write the 8-bit string in a second try.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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