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

Fredrik Lundh fredrik at pythonware.com
Mon Oct 3 21:47:19 CEST 2005

Antoine Pitrou wrote:

> > 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 brary (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.

huh? first you talk about functions that convert unicode strings to 8-bit strings, now you talk about functions that return raw 8-bit strings? and all this in response to a post that argues that it's in fact a good idea to use plain strings to hold textual data that happens to contain ASCII only, because 1) it works, by design, and 2) it's almost always more efficient.

if you don't know what your own argument is, you cannot expect anyone to understand it.

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