[Python-Dev] PEP 414 - Unicode Literals for Python 3 (original) (raw)

martin at v.loewis.de martin at v.loewis.de
Tue Feb 28 09:01:23 CET 2012

A couple of people have said that 'native string' is spelt 'str', but I'm not sure that's the right answer. For example, 2.x's cString.StringIO expects native strings, not Unicode:

Your counter-example is non-ASCII characters/bytes. I doubt that this
is a valid use case; in a "native" string, these shouldn't occur (i.e. native
strings should always be ASCII), since the semantics of non-ASCII changes drastically between 2.x and 3.x. So whoever defines some API to take "native" strings
can't have defined a valid use of non-ASCII in that interface.

I'm not saying this is the right thing to do for all cases - just that str() may not be, either. This should be elaborated in the PEP.

Indeed it should. If there is a known application of non-ASCII native strings, I surely would like to know what that is.

Regards, Martin

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