[Python-3000] Recursive str

[atsuo ishimoto]

2008/4/16, Michael Urman <murman at gmail.com>:
> I'll miss this, as I suspect the case of printing a list of unicode
>  strings will be fairly common. Given Unicode identifiers, even print
>  locals() could hit this. But perhaps tools for printing better
>  summaries of the contents of lists and dicts, or shell quoting (repr
>  as is makes a passable hack for quotes and spaces, but not unicode
>  characters), etc., can alleviate the pain well enough.
>
If such tools are given, but I'm not sure it is enough.
Using repr() to build output string is common practice in Python world,
so repr() is called everywhere in Python-core and third-party applications
to print objects, emitting logs, etc.,.

For example,

>>> f = open("日本語")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "c:\ww\Python-3.0a4-orig\lib\io.py", line 212, in __new__
    return open(*args, **kwargs)
  File "c:\ww\Python-3.0a4-orig\lib\io.py", line 151, in open
    closefd)
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '\u65e5\u672c\u8a9e'

This is annoying error message. Or, in Python 2,

>>> f = open(u"日本語", "w")
>>> f
<open file u'\u65e5\u672c\u8a9e', mode 'w' at 0x009370F8>

This repr()ed form is difficult to read. When Japanese (or Chinise)
programmers look u'\u65e5\u672c\u8a9e',  they'll have strong
impression that Python is not intended to be used in their country.