Tkinter wart: returned texts are sometimes strings, sometime Unicode strings

[Eric Brunel]

Hi all,

I stepped again on a problem I had too many times, and I must ask: why on earth 
do Tkinter return plain strings when getting a text value using only ASCII 
charcaters and a Unicode string when the same text contains anything else? This 
forces to do things like:

if type(text) == type(unicode('')): text = text.encode(...)

everywhere, which is:
1/ utterly ugly
2/ really too easy to forget

Why not return plain strings encoded as UTF-8, for example? That way, everything 
should always work and one should never get UnicodeError's again, or even 
stranger errors (like line endings printing as string '\n' instead of real line 
endings...). I really don't see the point in returning once an object with one 
type, and once with another type _depending on the user's input_... Returning a 
string encoded as UTF-8 makes much more sense to me... If the user wants another 
encoding, the text may be reencoded via unicode(...).encode(...) afterwards.

Any opinions?
-- 
- Eric Brunel <eric.brunel at pragmadev.com> -
PragmaDev : Real Time Software Development Tools - http://www.pragmadev.com