PEP 263 comments

[Martin von Loewis]

bokr at oz.net (Bengt Richter) writes:

> I'm not sure what you mean by 'encoding cookies' but I assume you
> mean something analogous to browser cookies, where some data of
> interest is stored separately but related to some other data and
> processing, like HTML form sumbissions etc.

I took the term from Stephen Turnbell, and I understood him to mean
the coding: variable that Emacs recognizes, i.e. some declaration
inside the file - quite unlike a browser cookie.

> Perhaps we could just use a file to contain extra file metadata,
> letting a file of metadata govern other files it names in the same
> directory as itself. Probably a dot file in *nix.

Nice idea, different PEP.

> For PEP 263 purposes, it would only need to be a text file with file
> names tab delimited from keyword=encoding-info, with the first line(s)
> perhaps with a glob pattern for a compact way of specifying encoding
> for a lot of files in a directory at once.

I don't think the file encoding information should be stored in a
different file; the risk of the two files becoming disassociated is
just to big to be acceptable.

> To provide international encoding for file-associated info, like
> a local dialect/special characters name etc., in a system whose
> native file naming is more restricted, perhaps this directory of
> file attributes could be standardized to UTF-8 for its own encoding.

We are not talking about file names here, but about file contents.

> There are some changes as to legality checks, apparently,
> as of last May. I'm wondering if this affects PEP 263
> and/or the unicode implementation in Python.

That doesn't affect this PEP; as for the Unicode 3.1 conformance, I
believe the current CVS implements UTF-8 correctly.

Regards,
Martin