[Csv] Re: [Python-Dev] csv module TODO list

[Andrew McNamara]

>>I'm still trying to understand what *needs* to be done - I would move to
>>how this is done only later. What APIs should be extended/changed, and
>>in what way?
[...]
>The reader interface currently returns a row at a time, consuming as many
>lines from the supplied iterable (with the most common iterable being
>a file). This suggests to me that we will need an optional "encoding"
>argument to the reader constructor, and that the reader will need to
>decode the source lines. That said, I'm hardly a unicode expert, so I
>may be overlooking something (could a utf-16 encoded character span a
>line break, for example).  The writer interface probably should have
>similar facilities.

Ah - I see that the codecs module provides an EncodedFile class - better
to use this than add encoding/decoding cruft to the csv module.

So, do we duplicate the current reader and writer as UnicodeReader and
UnicodeWriter (how else do we know to use the unicode parser)? What about
the "dialects"? I guess if a dialect uses no unicode strings, it can be
applied to the current parser, but if it does include unicode strings,
then the parser would need to raise an exception.

The DictReader and DictWriter classes will probably need matching
UnicodeDictReader/UnicodeDictWriter versions (use common base class,
just specify alternate parser).

-- 
Andrew McNamara, Senior Developer, Object Craft
http://www.object-craft.com.au/