[Python-Dev] unicode imports (original) (raw)

Bob Ippolito bob at redivi.com
Fri Jun 16 19:04:41 CEST 2006

On Jun 16, 2006, at 9:02 AM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

At 01:29 AM 6/17/2006 +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Kristján V. Jónsson wrote:

A cursory glance at import.c shows that the import mechanism is fairly complicated, and riddled with "char *path" thingies, and manual string arithmetic. Do you have any suggestions on a clean way to unicodify the import mechanism?

Can you install a PEP 302 path hook and importer/loader that can handle path entries that are Unicode strings? (I think this would end up being the parallel implementation you were talking about, though) If the code that traverses sys.path and sys.pathhooks is itself unicode-unaware (I don't remember if it is or isn't), then you might be able to trick it by poking a Unicode-savvy importer directly into the pathimportercache for affected Unicode paths. Actually, you would want to put it in sys.pathhooks, and then instances would be placed in pathimportercache automatically. If you are adding it to the pathhooks after the fact, you should simply clear the pathimportercache. Simply poking stuff into the pathimportercache is not a recommended approach. One issue is that the package and file names still have to be valid Python identifiers, which means ASCII. Unicode would be, at best, permitted only in the path entries. If I understand the problem correctly, the issue is that if you install Python itself to a Unicode directory, you'll be unable to import anything from the standard library. This isn't about module names, it's about the places on the path where that stuff goes.

There's a similar issue in that if sys.prefix contains a colon,
Python is also busted: http://python.org/sf/1507224

Of course, that's not a Windows issue, but it is everywhere else. The
offending code in that case is Modules/getpath.c, which probably also
has to change in order to make unicode directories work on Win32
(though I think there may be a separate win32 implementation of
getpath).

-bob

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list