--- "Da Silva, Mike" <Mike.Da.Silva@uk.fid-intl.com> wrote:

As I see it, the relative pros and cons of UTF-8 versus UTF-16 for use as an internal string representation are: [snip] Regards, Mike da Silva

Note that by going with UTF16, we get both. We will certainly have a codec for utf8, just as we will for ISO-Latin-1, Shift-JIS or whatever. And a perfectly ordinary Python string is a great place to hold UTF8; you can look at it and use most of the ordinary string algorithms on it. I presume no one is actually advocating dropping ordinary Python strings, or the ability to do rawdata = open('myfile.txt', 'rb').read() without any transformations? - Andy ===== Andy Robinson Robinson Analytics Ltd. ------------------ My opinions are the official policy of Robinson Analytics Ltd. They just vary from day to day. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com