[Python-Dev] Dicts are broken Was: unicode hell/mixing str and unicode asdictionarykeys (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Thu Aug 10 11:10:42 CEST 2006

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

M.-A. Lemburg schrieb:

Note that we are not discussing changing the behavior of the eq comparison between strings and Unicode, since this has always been to raise exceptions in case the automatic propagation fails. Not sure what you are discussing: This is precisely what I'm discussing. Making that change would solve this problem.

... and introduce a whole set of new problems, namely finding all the places in your code that are not Unicode compatible.

Instead of reverting the patch and continue to silencing exceptions in the dict lookup, you are proposing to extend the behavior to all equal comparisons of strings and Unicode. That would be a major change in the semantics, not just a bug fix as you seem to imply.

Since the problem of mixing strings and Unicode will go away in Py3k anyway, I suggest we do everything to help programmers make their applications Unicode compatible instead of trying to hide all problem cases from them.

Note that all of these problem go away if you stick to Unicode for all text data in your application. This will also make porting the application to Py3k a lot easier.

The discussion is about silencing exceptions in the dict lookup mechanism - something which used to happen and now no longer is done.

Regards,

Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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