[I18n-sig] Transparent Encoding

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Paul Prescod wrote:
> 
> "Martin v. Loewis" wrote:
> >
> >...
> > An EncodedFile is not suitable since it has byte strings on both ends,
> > and Unicode strings only inside.
> 
> EncodedFile seems to work as I ask if I pass it the encoding name as
> "unicode-internal". Furthermore, code that does that is much simpler
> than code that looks up the codec manually. I'm not a big fan of those
> codec tuples.
> 
> Current:
> 
> writer = codecs.lookup("utf-8")[3]
> stream = writer(fileobj)
> 
> Proposed:
> 
> codecs.EncodedFile(fileobj, None, "utf-8")
> 
> As I understand it, you can almost always go without looking up the
> encoder tuple thanks to the .encode method. And you can almost always go
> without looking up the decoder, thanks to the .decode method. This
> EncodedFile convention would allow most common cases of wrapping Unicode
> to avoid looking up the tuple also.

Paul, I still don't understand what you really want to achieve.
Do you want a file-like object which writes utf-8 and can
take Unicode as input for write (as well as strings which are
then handled in the usual ASCII way) and returns Unicode for
.read() ?

The encoding 'unicode-internal' is really only meant for low-level
access to how we chose to represent Unicode at C level. This could
well change in some future version (note that Unicode is still
evolving and probably will continue to do so for some time;
e.g. Unicode 3.1 is just out the door and adds another 50k character
points, using the non-BMP space for the first time...).

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH
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