[Python-Dev] unicode Exception messages in py2.7 (original) (raw)

Tres Seaver tseaver at palladion.com
Thu Nov 14 22:55:19 CET 2013

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On 11/14/2013 04:02 PM, Benjamin Peterson wrote:

2013/11/14 Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov>:

So a proposal:

Use 'replace" mode for the encoding to the default, and at least the user would see SOMETHING of the message. In a common case, it would be a lot of ascii, and in the worse case it would be a lot of question marks -- still better than a totally blank message. Another option would be to use the str(repr(themessage)) so the user would get the escaped version. Though I think that would be more ugly. Unfortunately both of these things change behavior so cannot be changed in Python 2.7.

Fixing any bug is "changing behavior"; 2.7 is not frozen for bugfixes. The real question is whether third-party code will break when the now-empty error messages appear with '?' littered through them?

About the only things I can think of which might break would be doctests, but people expect those to break across third-dot releases of Python (one reason why I hate them). Exception repr is explicitly not part of any backward-compatibility guarantees in Python. Or code which explicitly works around the breakage could fail (urlparse changes between 2.7.3 and 2.7.4, anyone?d(

Tres. - --

Tres Seaver +1 540-429-0999 tseaver at palladion.com Palladion Software "Excellence by Design" http://palladion.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/

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