[Python-Dev] Python Language Summit EuroPython 2010 (original) (raw)

Alexander Belopolsky alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com
Mon Jul 26 04:20:03 CEST 2010

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 9:46 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote: ..

Maybe self.format(..).encode('ascii')?  ...encode('utf-8') is a tempting alternative as well. -1 That would bring back the "it fails for some users but passes for the developer" problem. (True, if the developer calls .encode('ascii') it may also break, but then at least it is something the developer chose to do.) How hard would it be to recode the sprintf language but with the locale fixed to "C"? That would always be ASCII.

This is exactly what I proposed at http://bugs.python.org/issue7584#msg110240 not so long ago. Given that stftime language uses every English letter as one of its codes (both caps and lower case), it would be an effort, but coding it in python should not be too hard. A C implementation would be harder, but there must be implementations around available under a suitable license that can be reused.

In short, definitely +1.

Otherwise, str(x).encode('ascii') might work, that's like the ISO format with the 'T' replaced by a space.

Before proposing format(x, ..).encode('ascii') above, I considered str(x).encode('ascii') , but then realized that for user-defined classes, str(x) is as likely to contain non-ASCII characters as format(x, ..).

What about .encode('utf-8')? I thought it was not supposed to break for any unicode.

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