[unicode] inconvenient unicode conversion of non-string arguments

[Holger Joukl]

Hi there,

I consider the behaviour of unicode() inconvenient wrt to conversion of
non-string
arguments.
While you can do:

>>> unicode(17.3)
u'17.3'

you cannot do:

>>> unicode(17.3, 'ISO-8859-1', 'replace')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, float found
>>>

This is somehow annoying when you want to convert a mixed-type argument
list
to unicode strings, e.g. for a logging system (that's where it bit me) and
want to make sure that possible raw string arguments are also converted to
unicode without errors (although by force).
Especially as this is a performance-critical part in my application so I
really
do not like to wrap unicode() into some custom tounicode() function that
handles
such cases by distinction of argument types.

Any reason why unicode() with a non-string argument should not allow the
encoding and errors arguments?
Or some good solution to work around my problem?

(Currently running on python 2.4.3)

Regards,
Holger

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