Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> writes:
It reduces the problem (compared to omitting the import and using a u() function), but it's still ugly and still involves the "action at a distance" of the unicode literals import.
I agree about the action-at-a-distance leading to non-obvious bugs and wasted head-scratching time caused by such. It could be mitigated somewhat by project-level conventions, e.g. that all string literals are Unicode on that project. Then, if you put yourself in the relevant mindset when working on that project, there are fewer surprises. It's probably a matter of choosing the lesser among evils, since the proposal seems to allow mixing of literals with and without u prefixes in 3.x code - doesn't that also seem ugly? When this came up earlier (when I think Chris McDonough raised it) the issue of what to do on 3.2 came up, and though it has been addressed somewhat in the PEP, it would be nice to see the suggested on-installation hook fleshed out a little more. Regards, Vinay Sajip