[Python-Dev] unifying str and unicode (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Mon Oct 3 21:37:22 CEST 2005

Hi,

Le lundi 03 octobre 2005 à 20:37 +0200, Fredrik Lundh a écrit :

> If I have an unicode string containing legal characters greater than > 0x7F, and I pass it to a function which converts it to str, the > conversion fails.

so? if it does that, it's not unicode safe. [...] what's that has to do with my argument (which is that you can safely mix ascii strings and unicode strings, because that's how things were designed).

If that's how things were designed, then Python's entire standard library (not to mention third-party libraries) is not "unicode safe" - to quote your own words - since many functions may return 8-bit strings containing non-ascii characters.

There lies the problem for many people, until the stdlib is fixed - or until the string types are changed. That's why you very regularly see people complaining about how conversions sometimes break their code in various ways.

Anyway, I don't think we will reach an agreement here. We have different expectations w.r.t. to how the programming language may/should handle general text. I propose we end the discussion.

Regards

Antoine.

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