Everything you did not want to know about Unicode in Python 3

[Ian Kelly]

On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 11:47 AM, alister
<alister.nospam.ware at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 12 May 2014 16:19:17 +0100, Mark Lawrence wrote:
>
>> This was *NOT* written by our resident unicode expert
>> http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about-unicode/
>>
>> Posted as I thought it would make a rather pleasant change from
>> interminable threads about names vs values vs variables vs objects.
>
> Surely those example programs are not the pythonoic way to do things or
> am i missing something?

The _is_binary_reader and _is_binary_writer functions look like they
could be simplified by calling isinstance on the io object itself
against io.TextIOBase, io.BufferedIOBase or io.RawIOBase, rather than
doing those odd 0-length reads and writes.  And then perhaps those
exception-swallowing try-excepts wouldn't be necessary.  But perhaps
there's a non-obvious reason why it's written the way it is.

And there appears to be a bug where everything *except* the filename
'-' is treated as stdin, so the script probably hasn't been tested at
all.

> if those code samples are anything to go by this guy makes JMF look
> sensible.

This is an ad hominem.  Just because his code sucks doesn't mean he's
wrong about the state of Unicode and UNIX in Python 3.