[Python-3000] PEP 3138- String representation in Python 3000

[Atsuo Ishimoto]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 1:30 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

>> One point still remains is default error handler for sys.stdout. I can
>> live with 'strict' error handler, but I think raising exceptions for
>> evenry un-supported characters by default is too exacting.
>
> I think to avoid exceptions you should arrange for the encoding to be
> capable of encoding all characters (e.g. utf8 or utf16).

The utf-8 console is fine for my personal development style, I'm
afraid it doesn't work for you. Whether your console is capable to
display Japanese characters or not, you will want to see Japanese
characters in hex-escaped characters, don't you?

>
> IMO it's important to trust that you didn't write garbage, unless you
> specifically asked for it.

Is this requested by users? With Python 2, we can always print strings
containing garbage without exceptions. Python 3 is much stricter in
this respect. To get meaningful information instead of tracebacks, we
need to know encoding of output device and characters to be printed
whenever we print strings. This is hard to be accomplished in
practice.

> PS> I couldn't get backslashescape to work -- is this just a proposal?

No. Works for me without any modifications. I tried with latest source form svn.

Python 3.0a5+ (py3k:63546, May 23 2008, 13:42:06) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on
 win32
>>> "パイソン".encode("ascii", "backslashreplace")
b'\\u30d1\\u30a4\\u30bd\\u30f3'
[39364 refs]