[Python-Dev] Proposal: from __future__ import unicode_string_literals

[Christian Heimes]

Eric Smith schrieb:
 > It's not implementable because the work has to occur in ast.c (see
> Py_UnicodeFlag).  It can't occur later, because you need to skip the 
> encoding being done in parsestr().  But the __future__ import can only 
> be interpreted after the AST is built, at which time the encoding has 
> already been applied.  There are some radical things you could do to 
> work around this, but it would be a gigantic change.

So this basically comes down to "Either spend lots of time (and money)
to rewrite the tokenizer and AST generator or keep the current behavior"? :/

> For this particular issue, just use u'' in 2.6 and let 2to3 deal with 
> it.  If you have some 2.6 code that you want to run in 3.0 (by way of 
> 2to3), I think all of your string literals should either be b'' or u''. 
>   Don't use plain ''.

For this particular issue one could probably and easily come up with a
fast fixer. A simple regexp should be cover 99% of all occurrences of
u'' and u"".

Christian