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

M.-A. Lemburg mal@lemburg.com
Wed, 13 Nov 2002 10:24:34 +0100

Martin v. Loewis wrote:

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.

Thanks to the time machine, this attribute is already available on stream objects created with codecs.open().

+1

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).

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