[Python-Dev] from future import unicode_strings? (original) (raw)

Jean-Paul Calderone exarkun at divmod.com
Thu Feb 16 01:56:17 CET 2006

On Thu, 16 Feb 2006 00:36:35 +0000 (UTC), Neil Schemenauer <nas at arctrix.com> wrote:

I'm in the process of summarizing the dicussion on the bytes object and an idea just occured to me. Imagine that I want to write code that deals with strings and I want to be maximally compatible with P3k. It would be nice if I could add:

from future import unicodestrings and have string literals without a 'u' prefix become unicode instances. I'm not sure how tricky the implementation would be but it seems like a useful feature.

FWIW, I've considered this before, and superficially at least, it seems attractive.

An even crazier idea is to have that import change 'str' to be an alias for 'unicode'.

That's further than I went, though :) Until there's a replacement for str, this would make it impossible to do certain things with that future import in effect.

Jean-Paul

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