[Python-Dev] Do I misunderstand how codecs.EncodedFile is supposed to work?

[Skip Montanaro]

The following simple session suggests I misunderstood how the
codecs.EncodedFile function should work:

    >>> import codecs
    >>> f = codecs.EncodedFile(open("unicode-test.txt", "w"), "utf-8")
    >>> s = 'Caffe\x92 Lena'
    >>> u = unicode(s, "cp1252")
    >>> u
    u'Caffe\u2019 Lena'
    >>> f.write(u.encode("utf-8"))
    >>> f.write(u)
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
      File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/codecs.py", line 453, in write
        data, bytesdecoded = self.decode(data, self.errors)
    UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

I thought the whole purpose of the EncodedFile class was to provide
transparent encoding.  Shouldn't it support transparent encoding of Unicode
objects?  That is, I told the system I want writes to be in utf-8 when I
instantiated the class.  I don't think I should have to call .encode()
directly.  I realize I can wrap the function in a class that adds the
transparency I desire, but it seems the whole point should be to make it
easy to write Unicode objects to files.

Skip