[Python-Dev] Use of coding cookie in 3.x stdlib (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Mon Jul 19 08:45:17 CEST 2010

Sounds like a good idea to try to remove redundant cookies and to remove most occasional use of non-ASCII characters outside comments (except for unittests specifically trying to test Unicode features). Personally I would use \xXX escapes instead of spelling out the characters in shlex.py, for example.

Both with or without the coding cookies, many ways of displaying text files garble characters outside the ASCII range, so it's better to stick to ASCII as much as possible.

--Guido

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 1:21 AM, Alexander Belopolsky <alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com> wrote:

I was looking at the inspect module and noticed that it's source starts with "# -- coding: iso-8859-1 --".   I have checked and there are no non-ascii characters in the file.   There are several other modules that still use the cookie:

Lib/ast.py:# -- coding: utf-8 -- Lib/getopt.py:# -- coding: utf-8 -- Lib/inspect.py:# -- coding: iso-8859-1 -- Lib/pydoc.py:# -- coding: latin-1 -- Lib/shlex.py:# -- coding: iso-8859-1 -- Lib/encodings/punycode.py:# -- coding: utf-8 -- Lib/msilib/init.py:# -- coding: utf-8 -- Lib/sqlite3/init.py:#-- coding: ISO-8859-1 -- Lib/sqlite3/dbapi2.py:#-- coding: ISO-8859-1 -- Lib/test/badcoding.py:# -- coding: uft-8 -- Lib/test/badsyntax3131.py:# -- coding: utf-8 -- I understand that coding: utf-8 is strictly redundant in 3.x.  There are cases such as Lib/shlex.py where using encoding other than utf-8 is justified.  (See http://svn.python.org/view?view=rev&revision=82560).  What are the guidelines for other cases?  Should redundant cookies be removed? Since not all editors respect the  -*- cookie, I think the answer should be "yes" particularly when the cookie is setting encoding other than utf-8.

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-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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