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

Martin v. Loewis martin@v.loewis.de
13 Nov 2002 19:29:17 +0100

"M.-A. Lemburg" <mal@lemburg.com> writes:

> 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).

So should StringIO object have an .encoding attribute or not?

If not, should

f = StringIO.StringIO() print >>f,x

try to invoke Unicode conversion or not? If it should, how should it find out that this is safe to do?

Regards, Martin