PEP263 (Specifying encoding) and bytecode strings

[Tony Meyer]

> No.  The A in ASCII stands for "American" (the rest of the 
> letters stand for "Standard Code for Information 
> Interchange).

Well, being American doesn't mean that accents aren't allowed.  Granted,
they've managed English a bit, but not that much.

> The standards body who approved that standard 
> is ANSI (the American National Standards Institute), and the 
> document that currently defines it is:
> Standard ANSI X3.4-1986, "US-ASCII. Coded Character Set - 7-Bit 
> American Standard Code for Information Interchange".
> US-ASCII is the preferred name of this encoding for MIME 
> purposes, by the way.  But almost always it's referred to as 
> just ASCII.

The IANA page had all of this, and pointed me to the rfc (1345).  My
mistake was searching for /xda, instead of reading the thing.  It's not
until section 5 that it gets to defining the charsets, and sure enough,
ANSI_X3.4-1986 doesn't include these.

> I suspect (but cannot be sure) that ISO 8859-1 is the 
> encoding you want to use for your purposes.

Thanks for that.  Looking at the description, it does seem like it.

Thanks for the help, much appreciated.

=Tony Meyer