[Python-Dev] (Not) delaying the 3.2 release (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Sep 16 19:56:56 CEST 2010

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 10:46 AM, Martin (gzlist) <gzlist at googlemail.com> wrote:

On 16/09/2010, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

In all cases I can imagine where such polymorphic functions make sense, the necessary and sufficient assumption should be that the encoding is a superset of 7-bit(*) ASCII. This includes UTF-8, all Latin-N variant, and AFAIK also the popular CJK encodings other than UTF-16. This is the same assumption made by Python's byte type when you use "character-based" methods like lower(). Well, depends on what exactly you're doing, it's pretty easy to go wrong: Python 3.2a2+ (py3k, Sep 16 2010, 18:43:45) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. import os, sys os.path.split("C:\十") ('C:\', '十') os.path.split("C:\十".encode(sys.getfilesystemencoding())) (b'C:\\x8f', b'') Similar things can catch out web developers once they step outside the percent encoding.

Well, that character is not 7-bit ASCII. Of course things will go wrong there. That's the whole point of what I said, isn't it?

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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