[Python-Dev] Divorcing str and unicode (no more implicit conversions). (original) (raw)

Michael Hudson mwh at python.net
Mon Oct 3 10:43:06 CEST 2005

Martin Blais <blais at furius.ca> writes:

What if we could completely disable the implicit conversions between unicode and str? In other words, if you would ALWAYS be forced to call either .encode() or .decode() to convert between one and the other... wouldn't that help a lot deal with that issue?

I don't know. I've made one or two apps safe against this and it's mostly just annoying.

How hard would that be to implement?

import sys reload(sys) sys.setdefaultencoding('undefined')

Would it break a lot of code? Would some people want that? (I know I would, at least for some of my code.) It seems to me that this would make the code more explicit and force the programmer to become more aware of those conversions. Any opinions welcome.

I'm not sure it's a sensible default.

Cheers, mwh

-- It is never worth a first class man's time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that. -- G. H. Hardy

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