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

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 
> 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.

I still believe that the docs are wrong, but nevermind. I'll fix
StringIO.py to continue to support Unicode in addition to strings
and buffer objects. It's basically only about special casing
Unicode in the .write() method.

BTW, I was never aware of the doc changes in this area and the 
test suite didn't bring up the issues either.

> - 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).

Unicode support in cStringIO would require a new implementation
since the machinery uses raw byte buffers.
 
> - 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.)

In StringIO.py this is not much of a problem since it uses
a list of snippets. Note that this is also why StringIO.py "supported"
Unicode in the first place (and that's why I think it was more an
artifact of the implementation than true intent).
 
> - 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.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH
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