str() should convert ANY object to a string without EXCEPTIONS !

[est]

>From python manual

str( [object])

Return a string containing a nicely printable representation of an
object. For strings, this returns the string itself. The difference
with repr(object) is that str(object) does not always attempt to
return a string that is acceptable to eval(); its goal is to return a
printable string. If no argument is given, returns the empty string,
''.


now we try this under windows:

>>> str(u'\ue863')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\ue863' in
position 0
: ordinal not in range(128)

FAIL.

also almighty Linux

Python 2.3.4 (#1, Feb  6 2006, 10:38:46)
[GCC 3.4.5 20051201 (Red Hat 3.4.5-2)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> str(u'\ue863')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\ue863' in
position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Python 2.4.4 (#2, Apr  5 2007, 20:11:18)
[GCC 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> str(u'\ue863')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\ue863' in
position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Python 2.5 (release25-maint, Jul 20 2008, 20:47:25)
[GCC 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> str(u'\ue863')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\ue863' in
position 0: ordinal not in range(128)


The problem is, why the f**k set ASCII encoding to range(128) ????????
while str() is internally byte array it should be handled in
range(256) !!!!!!!!!!

http://bugs.python.org/issue3648

One possible solution(Windows Only)

>>> str(u'\ue863'.encode('mbcs'))
'\xfe\x9f'
>>> print u'\ue863'.encode('mbcs')
þŸ


I now spending 60% of my developing time dealing with ASCII range(128)
errors. It was PAIN!!!!!!

Please fix this issue.

http://bugs.python.org/issue3648

Please.