Message 143310 - Python tracker (original) (raw)

After the recent discussions on python-dev I went through the Unicode howto and fixed a few things, then I found this issue so I'm attaching the patch here. The patch addresses mostly markup issues, but it also removes the usage of 'byte string'. A few more things that should be done:

• clarify some more terms (e.g. codepoints, code units, characters, possibly scalar values etc.);
• mention the differences between narrow and wide builds, including:
  • a discussion about the UCS-2/UTF-16 implementation of narrow builds;
  • something about surrogates and surrogate pairs;
  • effects of slicing and indexing on narrow builds;
  • functions/methods that (don't) accept non-BMP chars on narrow builds;
• something about Unicode supports in the re module (this probably can wait after the 'regex' inclusion).

Also the codecs doc has a section about Unicode and encodings that might be moved to the howto.