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

Martin v. Loewis martin@v.loewis.de
13 Nov 2002 22:11:46 +0100

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

The fact that StringIO works with Unicode (and then only in the case where you only pass Unicode to it) is more an implementation detail than a true feature.

It's a true feature. You explicitly fixed that feature in

revision 1.20 date: 2002/01/06 17:15:05; author: lemburg; state: Exp; lines: +8 -5 Restore Python 2.1 StringIO.py behaviour: support concatenating Unicode string snippets to larger Unicode strings.

This fix should also go into Python 2.2.1.

after you broke it in

revision 1.19 date: 2001/09/24 17:34:52; author: lemburg; state: Exp; lines: +4 -1 branches: 1.19.12; StringIO patch #462596: let's [c]StringIO accept read buffers on input to .write() too.

cStringIO doesn't have this implementation detail, so porting from StringIO to the much faster cStringIO doesn't work at all for Unicode.

Correct. That still doesn't make it an implementation detail.

I think that StringIO and cStringIO should be regarded as binary streams without any encoding knowledge. It is easy enough to wrap these into Unicode aware streams using the codecs.StreamReaderWriter class as is done in codecs.open().

Then why did you fix that behaviour when you broke it?

Regards, Martin