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

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Mon Oct 24 23:06:38 CEST 2005

M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

There seems to be a general misunderstanding here: even if you have UCS4 storage, it is still possible to slice a Unicode string in a way which makes rendering it correctly. [impossible?]

Unicode has the concept of combining code points, e.g. you can store an "é" (e with a accent) as "e" + "'". Now if you slice off the accent, you'll break the character that you encoded using combining code points.

While this is all true, I agree with Neil that it should do whatever it does consistently across implementations, i.e. len("\U00010000") should always give the same result, and I think this result should always be 1.

How to best implement this efficiently is an entirely different question, as is the question whether you can render arbitrary substrings in a meaningful way.

Regards, Martin

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