It got a little silent around the 7-bit vs. 8-bit vs. UTF-8 discussion.

Not that I would like it to restart (I think everybody has made their point), but it kind of surprised me that now with the ability to actually set the default string encoding at run-time, noone seems to have played around with it...

...

...

import sys sys.set_string_encoding('unicode-escape') "abcäöü" + u"abc"

u'abc\344\366\374abc'

...

...

"abcäöü\u1234" + u"abc"

u'abc\344\366\374\u1234abc'

...

...

print "abcäöü\u1234" + u"abc"

abc\344\366\374\u1234abc

Any takers ?

BTW, has anyone tried to use the codec design for other tasks than converting text ? It should also be usable for e.g. compressing/decompressing or other data oriented content.