[Python-Dev] Re: gettext in the standard library (original) (raw)

Martin von Loewis loewis@informatik.hu-berlin.de
Sun, 20 Aug 2000 12:51:16 +0200 (MET DST)

Hmm, if your catalogs are encoded in UTF-8 and use non-ASCII chars then the traditional API would have to raise encoding errors

I don't know what you mean by "traditional" here. The gettext.gettext implementation in Barry's patch will return the UTF-8 encoded byte string, instead of raising encoding errors - no code conversion takes place.

Perhaps the return value type of .gettext() should be given on the .install() call: e.g. encoding='utf-8' would have .gettext() return a string using UTF-8 while encoding='unicode' would have it return Unicode objects.

No. You should have the option of either receiving byte strings, or Unicode strings. If you want byte strings, you should get the ones appearing in the catalog.

Regards, Martin