[Python-Dev] Printing and __unicode__

[Martin v. Loewis]

"M.-A. Lemburg" <mal@lemburg.com> writes:

> > In case the stream is "natively" Unicode (i.e. doesn't ever convert to
> > byte strings), setting encoding to None should be allowed (this
> > actually indicates that StringIO should have the encoding attribute).
> 
> -1
> 
> The presence of .encoding should indicate that it is
> safe to write Unicode objects to .write(). Let the stream
> decide what to do with the Unicode object (e.g. it would
> probably encode the Unicode object using the .encoding
> and only then write it to the outside world).

So should StringIO object have an .encoding attribute or not?

If not, should

f = StringIO.StringIO()
print >>f,x

try to invoke Unicode conversion or not? If it should, how should it
find out that this is safe to do?

Regards,
Martin