[Python-Dev] PEP 292-related: why string substitution is not the same operation as data formatting

[Skip Montanaro]

    Lalo> These strings may be the result of running some non-string objects
    Lalo> trough str(foo) - but, we are making no assumptions about these
    Lalo> objects. Just that str(foo) is somehow meaningful. And, to my
    Lalo> knowledge, there are no python objects for which str(foo) doesn't
    Lalo> work.

Unicode objects can't always be passed to str():

    >>> str(u"abc")
    'abc'
    >>> p = u'Scr\xfcj MacDuhk'
    >>> str(p)
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
    UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

(My default encoding is "ascii".)

You need to encode Unicode objects using the appropriate charset, which may
not always be the default.

Skip