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

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Jun 17 06:17:23 CEST 2006

Phillip J. Eby wrote:

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.

Oh, I agree - poking it in directly was a desperation measure if the path_hooks machinery didn't like Unicode either.

I've since gone and looked, and you may be screwed either way - the standard import paths appear to be always put on the system path as encoded 8-bit strings, not as Unicode objects.

That said, it also appears that the existing machinery should be able to handle non-ASCII path items, so long as 'Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding' is set correctly. If it isn't handling it, then there's something else going wrong.

Modules/getpath.c and friends don't encode the results returned by the platform APIs, so the strings in

Kristján, can you provide more details on the fault you get when trying to import from the path containing the Chinese characters? Specifically:

What is the actual file system path? What do sys.prefix, sys.exec_prefix and sys.path contain? What does sys.getdefaultencoding() return? What do sys.stdin.encoding, sys.stdout.encoding and sys.stderr.encoding say? What does "python -v" show? Does adding the standard lib directories manually to sys.path make any difference? Does setting PYTHONHOME to the appropriate settings make any difference?

Running something like the following would be good:

import sys print "Prefixes:", sys.prefix, sys.exec_prefixes print "Path:", sys.path print "Default encoding:", sys.getdefaultencoding() print "Input encoding:", sys.stdin.encoding, print "Output encodings:", sys.stdout.encoding, sys.stderr.encoding try: import string # Make python -v do something interesting except ImportError: print "Could not find string module" sys.path.append(u"stdlib directory name") try: import string # Make python -v do something interesting except ImportError: print "Could not find string module"

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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