[Python-Dev] Support byte string API of Windows in Python3? (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Mon Apr 19 22:53:36 CEST 2010

Antoine Pitrou wrote:

Victor Stinner <victor.stinner haypocalc.com> writes:

It's a choice, I didn't want to patch Windows because I know that Windows use unicode internally. I consider that developers using Python3 should use unicode on Windows, and byte or unicode+surrogates on other OS. I think both possibilities should be available on all OSes, so as to make it easier to write cross-platform code. Having to switch being bytes and unicode depending on the OS means developers will have to deal with encoding issues themselves, which is suboptimal from a language usability's point of view.

Indeed, you shouldn't be switching. Instead, you should be using Unicode strings all the time.

Regards, Martin

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