[Python-Dev] Python and the Unicode Character Database (original) (raw)

Lennart Regebro regebro at gmail.com
Tue Nov 30 09:10:37 CET 2010

On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 21:24, Alexander Belopolsky <alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com> wrote:

While we have little choice but to follow UCD in defining str.isidentifier(), I think Python can promise users more stability in what it treats as space or as a digit in its builtins.

Why? I can see this is a problem if one character that earlier was allowed no longer is. That breaks backwards compatibility. This doesn't.

float('١٢٣٤.٥٦') 1234.56 is more important than to assure users that once their program accepted some text as a number, they can assume that the text is ASCII.

I think it is more important. In python 3, you can never ever assume anything is ASCII any more. ASCII is practically dead an buried as far as Python goes, unless you explicitly encode to it.

def deposit(self, amountstr): self.balance += float(amountstr) auditlog("Deposited: " + amountstr)

Auditor: $ cat numbered-account.log Deposited: ?????.??

That log reasonably should be in UTF-8 or something else, in which case this is not a problem. And that's ignoring that it makes way more sense to log the numerical amount.

-- Lennart Regebro: http://regebro.wordpress.com/ Python 3 Porting: http://python3porting.com/ +33 661 58 14 64

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