[Python-Dev] Re: Multibyte repr() (original) (raw)

Martin v. Loewis martin@v.loewis.de
09 Oct 2002 23:00:55 +0200

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

>>> u = u'\u1f40' >>> s = u.encode('utf8') >>> s 'a=\x80' >>>

The latter output is not helpful, because the encoding of s is not the locale's encoding.

[Somehow, the accents got lost in your message]

It isn't helpful, but it isn't strictly wrong, either. In this specific case, people are used to see utf-8 being interpreted as Latin-1 - that form of "mojibake" is very common, so they will know what happened.

I question whether the hex representation is more helpful: it depends on how you need to interpret the result you get.

Regards, Martin