[Python-Dev] str object going in Py3K (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Feb 16 00:15:48 CET 2006

On 2/15/06, Michael Foord <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:

I'm intrigued by the encoding guessing techniques you envisage.

Don't hold your breath. I am not very interested in guessing encodings -- I was just commenting on posts by others that mentioned difficulties caused by this approach. My position is that the standard library (with the exception of XML processing code perhaps) shouldn't be guessing encodings but simply using the encoding specified by the user (or the OS default) in the environment or some such place. (It is OS dependent how to retrieve this information but my hypothesis is that every OS with any kind of text support has a way to get this info -- even if it's as rudimentary as "it's always ASCII" (v7 Unix :-) or "it's always UTF-8" (I am hoping this will eventually be the answer in the distant future).

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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