[Python-Dev] Relaxing Unicode error handling (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Mon Jan 5 11:44:43 EST 2004

>> I'd like to add a static property unicode.errorhandling, ... >> What do you think?

Guido> This is a global default, right? Seems to work for the socket Guido> timeout; I think the case for a global default is similar. Not so fast, pardner. Note that the socket module's timeout would be most beneficial to users of higher level modules (urllib[2]?, httplib, ftplib, etc), not directly by programmers. To the best of my knowledge, none of these modules have been adapted to this new feature yet, so I think it's still a bit premature extrapolate from socket.defaulttimeout to unicode.errorhandling. Also, as Phillip Eby pointed out, a UnicodeError generally results from an error in my code, not an intractable problem. (That's my experience, anyway.)

Sure. So in your programs, keep the default.

But if someone has written a program and decides that they don't want to deal with their (their!) errors by fixing the code, but rather would continue to go with possibly broken data (and they may well know enough about their application to know that that is harmless), why should we not give them a way to do that?

AFAIK all the proposal does is give a way to change the default error handling -- any code that sets an explicit error handling policy will continue to receive exceptions.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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