At 11:01 AM -0400 27-04-2000, Guido van Rossum wrote:
Where does the current approach require work?
- We need a way to indicate the encoding of Python source code. (Probably a "magic comment".)
How will other parts of a program know which encoding was used for non-unicode string literals? It seems to me that an encoding attribute for 8-bit strings solves this nicely. The attribute should only be set automatically if the encoding of the source file was specified or when the string has been encoded from a unicode string. The attribute should *only* be used when converting to unicode. (Hm, it could even be used when calling unicode() without the encoding argument.) It should *not* be used when comparing (or adding, etc.) 8-bit strings to each other, since they still may contain binary goop, even in a source file with a specified encoding!
- We need a way to indicate the encoding of input and output data files, and we need shortcuts to set the encoding of stdin, stdout and stderr (and maybe all files opened without an explicit encoding).
Can you open a file *with* an explicit encoding? Just