On 10/3/05, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:
If that's how things were designed, then Python's entire standard brary (not to mention third-party libraries) is not "unicode safe" - to quote your own words - since many functions may return 8-bit strings containing non-ascii characters.
huh? first you talk about functions that convert unicode strings to 8-bit strings, now you talk about functions that return raw 8-bit strings?
Are you deliberately missing the argument? And can't you understand that conversions are problematic in both directions (str -> unicode /and/ unicode -> str)?
Both directions are a problem. Just a note: it's not so much the conversions that I find problematic, but rather the implicit nature of the conversions (combined with the fact that they may fail). In addition to being difficult to track down, these implicit conversions may be costing processing time as well. cheers,