[Python-Dev] Re: [XML-SIG] printing Unicode xml to StringIO

[Guido van Rossum]

Whoa!

- Since we added a note to the docs that StringIO supports Unicode, we
  clearly should continue to support that, and it's a bug if it
  doesn't.

- OTOH, Unicode for cStringIO should be considered at best a feature
  request.  I don't mind if cStringIO doesn't support Unicode -- it
  never has, AFAIK, so it won't break much code.  I don't believe it's
  much faster than StringIO, unless you use the C API (like cPickle
  does).

- Of course, when Unicode is supported, mixing ASCII and Unicode
  should be supported too.  (But not necessarily mixing 8-bit strings
  containing characters in the range \200-\377, since there's no
  default encoding for this range.)

- Since this changed from 2.1 to 2.2, we should restore this
  capability in 2.2.1; I would say that 2.2.1 can't go out until this
  is fixed.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)