[Python-3000] locale-aware strings ?

[Brian Quinlan]

Martin v. Löwis wrote:
>> I can assure you
>> that most of the documents that I work with are not in CP436 - they are 
>> a combination of ASCII, ISO8859-1, and UTF-8. I would also guess that 
>> this is true of many Windows XP (US-English) users. So, for me and users 
>> like me, Python is going to silently misinterpret my data.
> 
> No. It will use a different API to determine the system encoding, and
> it will guess correctly.

You are addressing a completely different issue. I am saying that Python 
is going to silently misinterpret my *data* and you are saying that it 
is going to correctly determine the *system encoding*.

As a user, I don't directly care if Python guesses my system encoding 
correctly or not, but I do care if it tries to interpret my UTF-8 
documents as Windows-1252 (which will succeed) and I end up 
transmitting/storing/displaying incorrect data.

Cheers,
Brian