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

M.-A. Lemburg mal@lemburg.com
Wed, 13 Nov 2002 19:50:24 +0100

Martin v. Loewis wrote:

"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?

StringIO should be considered a non-Unicode aware stream, so it should not implement .encoding. Instead, PyFile_WriteObject() will simply call str on the Unicode object and thus use the default encoding for conversion (this is what StringIO does currently).

If somebody wants to use a StringIO object as Unicode aware stream, the tools in codecs.py can be used for this (basically by doing the same kind of wrapping as codecs.open() does).

If it should, how should it find out that this is safe to do?

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH

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