[Python-Dev] unicode inconsistency? (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Thu Sep 9 23:11:53 CEST 2004

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

No, it would not "work" the way I want. I don't want to force things to unicode strings unless necessary. Unicode always causes coercion towards Unicode, just like floats always cause coercion towards floats. Nothing's going to change at that end. Not always. As we are discussing right now, str() (and indirectly %s) coerce Unicode objects into string objects. Also, PyArgParseTuple coerces Unicode into byte strings for the "s" and "t" formats.

I may have been misunderstanding Neil, but I was referring to Neil's comment that he would not like things to get forced to Unicode.

If I look at his initial posting, it looks as if Neil wanted '%s' % A() to return u'\u1234'.

The current implementation tests for Unicode-subclasses, but does not look at the str return object. In order to add support for the latter we'd have to add a new C API, e.g. PyObject_Text() that returns a StringTypes instance, or catch the UnicodeError caused by the ASCII codec and let this trigger a redirection to the Unicode formatting routine (however, this is dangerous since it would cause the object to be evaluated twice).

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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