unicode woes

[Brian Quinlan]

Ulli Stein wrote:

> Some weeks ago the management decided to deploy unicode so that we can
> handle every charset uniformly. The problem which showed at first: we
> realized that we cannot change the encoding in site.py afterwards,
i.e. we
> have to specify the encoding all the way.

Why do you want to change the encoding of site.py at all?

> It got worse and worse because the unicode encoding spread like a
virus
> through all the source code.

That's exactly what should happen. You should minimize your use of
strings in a Unicode-aware application. 

> Furthermore, in Python you have no way to detect, which encoding a
special
> unicode string atually is.

I have no idea what this means.


> We ended up having our own u() function. 

This function is insane. Why do you think that you need it?

Maybe you could talk a bit more about what your application is supposed
to do. I've written large Unicode-aware applications in Python and it
wasn't that difficult (at least the Python aspect wasn't).

Cheers,
Brian