[Python-Dev] Multilingual programming article on the Red Hat Developer blog (original) (raw)

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Tue Sep 16 17:27:44 CEST 2014

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 1:00 AM, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:

That isn't the case in the email package. The smuggled bytes are not errors[*], they are literally smuggled bytes.

But they're not characters, which is what Stephen and I were saying - and contrary to what Jim said about treating them as characters. At best, they represent characters but in some encoding other than the one you're using, and you have no idea how many bytes form a character or anything. So you can't, for instance, word-wrap the text, because you can't know how wide these unknown bytes are, whether they represent spaces (wrap points), or newlines, or anything like that. You can't treat them as characters, so while you have them in your string, you can't treat it as a pure Unicode string - it''s a Unicode string with smuggled bytes.

ChrisA

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