What happened with python? messed strings?

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:54:20 -0300, <algaba at droog.sdf-eu.org> escribió:

> I used extensively python and now I find this mess with strings,
> I can't even reproduce tutorial examples:
>>>> "apfel".encode('utf-8')  (it was with umlaut)
>   File "<stdin>", line 0
>    ^
> SyntaxError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc4 in position 1:
> ordinal not in range(128)
>>>>
> Is there any good guide to this mess of codecs and hell ?

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>

Python Unicode Howto: <http://docs.python.org/dev/howto/unicode.html>

> python should have stayed at version 1.5, every single 'improvement'
> has been a mess. But this is the definitive hell.

Nobody forces you to use a newer version. You can download 1.5.2 from http://www.python.org/download/releases/1.5

-- 
Gabriel Genellina