[Python-Dev] Small issues in gettext support (original) (raw)
Gustavo Niemeyer niemeyer at conectiva.com
Mon Apr 26 11:16:07 EDT 2004
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I'd be worried most about backwards compatibility, since the module has worked this way since its early days. Also, wouldn't this be an
IMO, the current behavior is wrong, so breaking backwards compatibility in that case would be fixing something important.
opportunity for getting lots of UnicodeErrors? E.g. my system encoding is 'ascii' so gettext() would fail for catalogs containing non-ascii characters. I shouldn't have to change my system encoding just to avoid errors, but with your suggestion, wouldn't that make many catalogs basically unusable for me?
There are a few extra points to notice here:
Different .mo files may have different encodings.
The translation system is made in a way that the programmer should not have to worry about the encoding used by the translators.
The current scheme may introduce a wrong practice: forcing translators to use some specific encoding to avoid breaking the program.
We already have support for getting the "unicode" version of the string. This is currently the right way to get the translation in some specific encoding, since it uncouples the translation encoding from the expected encoding.
In cases where you'd get the "UnicodeError", you'd see a mangled string which would be unreadable. To avoid the UnicodeError, we may also return the original string in cases where the UnicodeError is raised.
Would adding bindtextdomaincodeset() would provide a way for the application to change the default encoding?
Yes, it changes the default encoding.
If so, I'd be in favor of adding bindtextdomaincodeset() but not changing the default encoding for returned strings. Then update the documentation to describe current behavior and how to change it via that function call.
Thanks for your suggestion!
-- Gustavo Niemeyer http://niemeyer.net
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