Guido van Rossum wrote:
....
Have you tried using this?
Yes. I haven't had large problems with it. As long as you know what is going on, it doesn't usually hurt anything because you can just explicitly set up the decoding you want. It's like the int division problem. You get bitten a few times and then get careful. It's the naive user who will be surprised by these random UTF-8 decoding errors. That's why this is NOT a convenience issue (are you listening MAL???). It's a short and long term simplicity issue. There are lots of languages where it is de rigeur to discover and work around inconvenient and confusing default behaviors. I just don't think that we should be ADDING such behaviors. -- Paul Prescod - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for himself It's difficult to extract sense from strings, but they're the only communication coin we can count on. - http://www.cs.yale.edu/~perlis-alan/quotes.html