[New-bugs-announce] [issue33409] Clarify the interaction between locale coercion & UTF-8 mode

[Nick Coghlan]

New submission from Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>:

While Victor and I reconciled the respective designs & implementations of PEP 538/540 (with 538 relying on 540 to handle the "No suitable target locale" case, and 540 relying on 538 to handle extension modules like GNU readline), the interaction between the two mechanisms currently isn't clear in the documentation.

So, before 3.7rc1 goes out, we should:

1. Combine the presentation of the two PEPs in the What's New documentation to make it clearer that they're tackling different aspects of the same problem
2. Clarify in the reference docs for PYTHONCOERCECLOCALE and PYTHONUTF8MODE that they're independent settings (so you have to explicitly turn them *both* off if you truly want to force ASCII based text handling in the C or POSIX locale)



(Issue raised based on a Twitter discussion with Anthony Shaw at https://twitter.com/anthonypjshaw/status/991614899791933441)

----------
assignee: ncoghlan
components: Documentation
messages: 316069
nosy: ncoghlan, vstinner
priority: high
severity: normal
stage: needs patch
status: open
title: Clarify the interaction between locale coercion & UTF-8 mode
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.7, Python 3.8

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue33409>
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