[I18n-sig] Re: [Python-Dev] Unicode debate (original) (raw)

Paul Prescod paul@prescod.net
Tue, 02 May 2000 11:11:13 -0500

Combining characters are a whole 'nother level of complexity. Charater sets are hard. I don't accept that the argument that "Unicode itself has complexities so that gives us license to introduce even more complexities at the character representation level."

FYI: Normalization is needed to make comparing Unicode strings robust, e.g. u"�" should compare equal to u"e\u0301".

That's a whole 'nother debate at a whole 'nother level of abstraction. I think we need to get the bytes/characters level right and then we can worry about display-equivalent characters (or leave that to the Python programmer to figure out...).

Paul Prescod - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for himself It's difficult to extract sense from strings, but they're the only communication coin we can count on. - http://www.cs.yale.edu/~perlis-alan/quotes.html