Reliably getting/setting the (current) encoding name?

[Michael Hudson]

"Mike C. Fletcher" <mcfletch at rogers.com> writes:

> Michael Hudson wrote:
> 
> >"Mike C. Fletcher" <mcfletch at rogers.com> writes:
> >  
> >>The codecs module doesn't appear to have a "get default codec name"
> >>function.  So I'm asking the question:
> >>
> >>    How does one reliably get the currently-active default codec name
> >>    (i.e. the one that reflects the currently-set locale) as suitable
> >>    for use with uncode.encode( ... )?
> >>    
> >
> >I don't know the answer to this one, I'm afraid.
> >
>  >>> import sys
>  >>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
> 'ascii'
> 
> (Alex mentioned it in his post)

But that doesn't change to reflect the locale, which I thought was the
point of what you asked.

> >Here I'd say: don't add conversion code "all over the joint", add it
> >"at the edges", i.e. where the unicode strings get into your library.
> >
> ...
> 
> Yes, I'm not particularly infatuated with the idea of multi-line
> conversion hacks all over my libraries :) , the difficulty with using
> the "edges" is that the (GUI) library is constantly interacting with
> various wxTextCtrl objects, which, in the Unicode builds of wxPython
> are suddenly returning unicode instead of str objects, which means the
> Unicode strings are arriving all through the library, sometimes being
> directed at the object model, sometimes at status messages, sometimes
> to the logging system etc.  

That did occur to me as a possible problem.  Did we mention converting
your app to all-unicode-all-the-time?  Oh yes, I think you did.  Try
it: it might not be as hard as you think.  I was surprised how easy it
was to convert pyrepl.

> At the moment, I'm going to go down the path to evil and requiring
> the application to set a useful default encoding using the hack Alex
> pointed out.

Don't come running to us when, etc. :-)

Cheers,
M.

-- 
  The bottom tier is what a certain class of wanker would call
  "business objects" ...                      -- Greg Ward, 9 Dec 1999