[Python-Dev] Import and unicode: part two (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Mon Jan 24 10:19:00 CET 2011

Guido van Rossum writes:

Really? I would have thought that cell phones have long been the platforms most supportive of Unicode.

I would think so too, except in Japan.

However, my previous phones exposed file systems with names encoded in Shift JIS to USB and IR browsers, though. (My current one uses Bluetooth, and I don't know how to "get at" the filesystem itself.) A lot of these devices also tend to present themselves as VFAT-formatted drives (a la a USB memory stick), and Shift JIS is very commonly used on those for reasons I don't really understand.

In any case, AIUI here the problem is like the problem of refactoring a "make"-based system. There are identifiers which are "spelled" one way inside of files which need to match the "spelling" of names of external filesystem objects. If you transport such a set of files to a POSIX system (which AFAIK most servers still are), then it's quite possible that the file names will get translated to the locale's encoding while the identifiers will not.

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