[Python-Dev] PEP 538 (review round 2): Coercing the legacy C locale to a UTF-8 based locale (original) (raw)

Martin (gzlist) gzlist at googlemail.com
Mon Jun 12 03:47:07 EDT 2017

Thanks for replying to my points!

On 12/06/2017, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

PYTHONIOENCODING=:strict remains the preferred way of forcing strict encoding checks on the standard streams, regardless of locale.

Then the user of my script has to care that it's written in Python and set that specifically in their crontab or so on...

In addition to providing a reliable escape hatch with no other potentially unwanted side effects (for when folks actually want the current behaviour), the entry for the off switch in the CLI usage docs also provides us with a convenient place to document the default behaviour.

The documentation aspect is an interesting consideration.

Having thought about it a bit more, my preferred option is having the disable be if either LC_ALL or LC_CTYPE vars are exactly 'C', then don't override. Otherwise (including for LANG=C), force C.UTF-8. The CLI usage docs could have a LC_CTYPE entry that goes into details of why.

Martin

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