Guido van Rossum wrote:
For data types whose output uses only ASCII, would it be acceptable if they always returned an 8-bit string and left it up to the caller to convert it to Unicode? This would apply to all numeric types. (The date/time types have a strftime() style API which means the user must be able to specifiy Unicode.)
To elaborate on this a bit (and handwaving a lot of important details out of the way) do you mean something like the following for the builtin format?: def format(obj, fmt_spec=None): if fmt_spec is None: fmt_spec='' result = obj.__format__(fmt_spec) if isinstance(fmt_spec, unicode): if isinstance(result, str): result = unicode(result) return result Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia --------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.boredomandlaziness.org