[Python-3000] Unicode and OS strings (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Sat Sep 15 00:40:00 CEST 2007

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

You chose the context of round-tripping *across encodings*, not me. Please stick with your context.

Maybe we have different ideas of what the problem is. I thought the problem is to take arbitrary byte sequences coming in as command-line args and represent them as unicode strings in such a way that the can be losslessly converted back into the same byte strings.

I was just pointing out that if you do this in a way that involves some sort of dynamically generated mapping, then it won't work if the round trip spans more than one Python session -- and that there are any number of ways that the data could get from one session to another, many of them not involving anything that one would recognise as a unicode encoding in the conventional sense.

-- Greg

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