[Python-Dev] len(chr(i)) = 2? (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri Nov 26 03:42:33 CET 2010

M.-A. Lemburg writes:

That would be a possibility as well... but I doubt that many users are going to bother, since slicing surrogates is just as bad as slicing combining code points and the latter are much more common in real life and they do happen to mostly live in the BMP.

That's only if you require 100% fidelity in the data, which may not be true in some use cases. Where 99.99% fidelity is good enough, an unexpected sliced surrogate pair is a show-stopper, while a sliced combining character sequence not only doesn't stop the show (at least in Python, and I doubt any correct Unicode process can signal a fatal error there either, I can put a tilde on a Cyrillic character if I want to, no?), it's probably readable enough that readers will assume a keypunch error.

Personally, if available I would always use some such dodge in server software (I don't care enough about 24x7 availability to write it myself, though). And never in a script for interactive use; something needs fixing, may as well take the fatal error and fix it on the spot. (Again, "on the spot" for me can mean "tomorrow".)

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