Python strings outside the 128 range

[Gerhard Fiedler]

On 2006-07-14 10:52:22, Diez B. Roggisch wrote:

>>>> Will print take care of encoding translation according to the encoding
>>>> used in the target console?
>>>
>>> Of course not. AFAIK there is no way figuring out which encoding the
>>> target console supports. The best you can do is to offer an option
>>> that allwos selection of the output encoding.
>> 
>> You can use the LANG environment variable on many systems. On mine,
>> it's set to en_GB.UTF-8, which causes a lot of software to
>> automatically choose the right encoding.
> 
> That might be a good heuristic - but on my Mac no LANG is set. So I
> should paraphrase my statement to "There is no reliable and
> cross-platform way figuring out which encoding the console uses". 

Right... without being a cross-platform specialist, I figured that much :)

I just thought that maybe the Python runtime had platform-specific
implementations for retrieving the platform-specific information about the
encoding used in the runtime environment (which is probably there on many
platforms) -- similar to maybe the platform-specific implementations of
file access, process and thread handling etc.

Anyway, it seems that anything non-ASCII is a bit problematic and needs
"manual" handling of the runtime environment encoding. Seems a bit odd,
given the worldwide distribution of Python... I would have thought that
such a rather basic task like printing an accented character on a console
had been solved in a standard way, rather than relying on individual
(wheel-reinventing) custom coding. Isn't that something that pretty much
everybody (outside the USA, at least) needs?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts,
Gerhard