unicode encoding usablilty problem

[Fredrik Lundh]

"aurora" <aurora00 at gmail.com> wrote:

>> if you don't know what a and b comes from, how can you be sure that
>> your program works at all?  how can you be sure they're both strings?
>
> a and b are both string.

how do you know that?

>> if you have unit tests, why don't they include Unicode tests?
>
> How do I structure the test cases to guarantee coverage? It is not  practical to test every 
> combinations of unicode/8-bit strings. Adding  non-ascii characters to test data probably make 
> problem pop up earlier. But it is arduous

sounds like you don't want to test for it.  sorry, cannot help.  I prefer
to design libraries so they can be tested, and design tests so they test all
important aspects of my libraries.  if you prefer another approach, there's
not much I can do, other than repeating what I said at the start: if you do
things the right way (decode on the way in, encode on the way out), it
just works.

</F>