[Python-3000] gettext

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Apr 24, 2008, at 6:18 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> Care to comment? Or know who should comment?
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Benjamin Peterson <musiccomposition at gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 7:32 AM
> Subject: [Python-3000] gettext
> To: Python 3000 <python-3000 at python.org>
>
>
> [I'm not a gettext expert, so sorry if the following is totally  
> wrong. :)]
>
> Are we going to want to keep the "u" variants of the gettext APIs
> around in 3.0? Also, the unicode parameters (for .install methods)
> don't make much sense in 3.0.
>
> I don't see how we could remove them in 3.0, but perhaps rename then
> to their non-"u" variants and deprecate?

I wonder if it makes more sense to keep a unicode version and a bytes  
version.  The simplest solution then would be to change gettext() to  
return an encoded bytes and leave ugettext() to return the unicode  
string.  I don't have a sense for how useful an encoded translated  
bytes will be in the real world, and I do think that the unicode  
translation will be far more likely.  That might argue for renaming  
ugettext() to gettext() and adding something like a egettext() or  
bgettext() method.

OTOH, the current names are inspired from GNU gettext so it seems to  
me there's not much value in renaming our methods, except to increase  
confusion and break backward compatibility <wink>.

- -Barry

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