[IPython-dev] Pasting fix, unicode woes

[Fernando Perez]

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 5:16 PM, Evan Patterson <epatters at enthought.com> wrote:
> I appreciate the desire for Unicode support (although I firmly believe
> that source code itself should *always* be in ASCII). Unfortunately,
> you're correct that there may be fair amount of effort involved in
> supporting Unicode robustly.

I also like my source code in ascii, though we've been already
overridden on that one:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3131/

In python3, unicode *source* is valid, so eventually we'll have to
deal with it, like it or not.  But the issue here is about unicode in
strings that we handle as input (paths, filenames, constants, etc),
not source code.  Though I realize that in the terminal, there's
always code intermixed with other input.  Fun...

By the way, this isn't really a new problem: there are bugs in the Qt
code re. unicode, but in the rest of ipython unicode is probably our
worst bug.  I even made a label for that:

http://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/labels/unicode

Some of those bugs are very old, and we haven't been able to fix them...

> In short, I may not have time to get this done in the next week and a
> half. We should discuss this further off-line, though.

OK.  At the very least we should audit and mark the places in the code
with text manipulations that are unicode-unsafe.  Otherwise it will
never get fixed...

Cheers,

f