[Python-Dev] Python-3.0, unicode, and os.environ (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Tue Dec 9 10:01:17 CET 2008

Glenn Linderman wrote:

On approximately 12/8/2008 9:30 AM, came the following characters from the keyboard of rdmurray at bitdance.com:

PS: I'd like to see a similar warning issued when an access attempt is made through os.environ to a variable that cannot be decoded.

And argv ? Seems like the warning technique could be useful for any interface that has been traditionally bytes, because that's the kind of characters that were, but now should move to (Unicode) characters. The warnings could be the same, or very similar. The question is if one global control should handle all types of bytes problems, or if there should be individual controls for each bytes problem, or both. I tend to believe in both; the paranoid can set exactly the ones they've coded for, the aggressive can set the global one. In this manner, new cases can be added to the global settings over time, if more are discovered -- it should be documented to handle future similar issues in a similar manner.

The warnings system provides that level of granularity for 'free' (so long as we set the stack level appropriately in the C-API warnings call).

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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