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

[Johannes Bauer]

On 13.05.2014 03:18, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> Armin Ronacher is an extremely experienced and knowledgeable Python 
> developer, and a Python core developer. He might be wrong, but he's not 
> *obviously* wrong.

He's correct about file name encodings. Which can be fixed really easily
wihtout messing everything up (sys.argv binary variant, open accepting
binary filenames). But that he suggests that Go would be superior:

> Which uses an even simpler model than Python 2: everything is a byte string. The assumed encoding is UTF-8. End of the story.

Is just a horrible idea. An obviously horrible idea, too.

Having dealt with the UTF-8 problems on Python2 I can safely say that I
never, never ever want to go back to that freaky hell. If I deal with
strings, I want to be able to sanely manipulate them and I want to be
sure that after manipulation they're still valid strings. Manipulating
the bytes representation of unicode data just doesn't work.

And I'm very very glad that some people felt the same way and
implemented a sane, consistent way of dealing with Unicode in Python3.
It's one of the reasons why I switched to Py3 very early and I love it.

Cheers,
Johannes

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