unicode string literals and "u" prefix

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Hi,

> Working for an insurance company, most of our data contain french
> accented characters.
> So, we are condemned to work essentially with unicode strings.
> In fact, it is hard to find examples where plain ascii strings would
> be useful in our case.
> Even data we retrieve from databases are returned to us as unicode
> strings.

This statement looks as if you confuse utf-8 and unicode. They are not the
same. The former is an encoding of the latter.

> A way of defaulting all string literal as unicode would have been a
> relief.

I can understand that wish, but it certainly would break too much existing
3rd-party-code. But I wonder if a tool as pychecker could be enhanced to
issue warnings on python code if string literals are not prefixed by an u.
-- 
Regards,

Diez B. Roggisch