[Python-Dev] Printing and unicode (original) (raw)

Martin v. Loewis martin@v.loewis.de
12 Nov 2002 20:12:09 +0100

Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> writes:

> B. A file indicates "unicode-awareness" somehow. For a Unicode-aware > file, it tries unicode, str, and repr, in order.

I like this.

Ok, then the question is: How can a file indicate its unicode-awareness? I propose that presence of an attribute "encoding" is taken as such an indication; this would cover all existing cases with no change to the file-like objects.

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).

Regards, Martin