UTF-8

[Olivier Verdier]

First off: i thoroughly enjoy python. I use it for scientific  
computing with scipy, numpy and matplotlib and it's an amazingly  
efficient and elegant language.

About this mailing list: it is very hard to search. I can't find any  
search field on the page: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/ 
python-list. I would greatly appreciate if you moved that list over  
to google, for instance, so that it be both searchable and rss-feedable.

My question is the following: how to set a default encoding in  
python? I read an old thread about that and it didn't seem possible  
by then.

The default encoding i wish to set is UTF-8 since it encodes unicode  
and is nowadays the standard encoding. Having ascii as a default  
encoding is a pretty strange choice since ascii encodes only 127  
characters (suitable only for English, without fancy symbols like €)  
whereas utf-8 encodes virtually infinitely many characters (suitable  
for all languages). Besides, utf-8 is a superset of ascii so having  
it by default won't harm anything.

At the very least there should be a configuration file that allows to  
set a default encoding (although setting anything else than utf-8  
should be advised against). Such a feature would be greatly  
appreciated by all of us non native English speakers around the world.

Best regards,

== Olivier