[Python-Dev] Backporting PEP 3101 to 2.6 (original) (raw)

Eric Smith eric+python-dev at trueblade.com
Fri Jan 11 16:39:04 CET 2008

Nick Coghlan wrote:

Guido van Rossum wrote:

For data types whose output uses only ASCII, would it be acceptable if they always returned an 8-bit string and left it up to the caller to convert it to Unicode? This would apply to all numeric types. (The date/time types have a strftime() style API which means the user must be able to specifiy Unicode.) To elaborate on this a bit (and handwaving a lot of important details out of the way) do you mean something like the following for the builtin format?: def format(obj, fmtspec=None): if fmtspec is None: fmtspec='' result = obj.format(fmtspec) if isinstance(fmtspec, unicode): if isinstance(result, str): result = unicode(result) return result

That's the approach I'm taking. The builtin format is the only caller of format that I know of, so it's the only place this would need to be done.

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list