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

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Mon Oct 3 11:43:13 CEST 2005

Michael Hudson wrote:

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')

You shouldn't post tricks like these :-)

The correct way to change the default encoding is by providing a sitecustomize.py module which then call the sys.setdefaultencoding("undefined").

Note that the codec "undefined" was added for just this reason.

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.

Me neither, especially since this would make it impossible to write polymorphic code - e.g. ', '.join(list) wouldn't work anymore if list contains Unicode; dito for u', '.join(list) with list containing a string.

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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