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

Martin v. Loewis martin at v.loewis.de
Tue Jan 6 15:59:53 EST 2004

M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

But if you change the default behaviour of the builtin codecs only, how would this help a user of a broken application ?

It would be even sufficient to change the behaviour of the us-ascii codec, as this is the default codec.

The user of the broken implementation would get question marks in places that would previously cause an exception. That may be acceptable, if it is only debugging output or log files; it may be tolerable if this is only for text seen by users.

The Unicode implementation would continue to use "strict" for things like low-level parser marker conversions and external codecs would also not work as expected (e.g. the Asian codecs).

Sure, but they would also not be the default codecs.

Not sure what "low-level parser marker conversions" are: what is a "parser marker"?

In the end, I don't think we'd gain anything much except another global to carry around.

It will make developers happier, as they need less urgently fix applications that blow up at the customer.

Regards, Martin

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