[Python-3000] Unicode strings, identifiers, and import

[Guido van Rossum]

The answer to all of this is the filesystem encoding, which is already
supported. Doesn't appear particularly difficult to me.

On 5/13/07, Michael Urman <murman at gmail.com> wrote:
> This occurred to me while reading the PEP 3131 discussion, and while
> it's not limited to PEP 3131 concerns, I don't believe I've seen
> discussed yet elsewhere. What is the interaction between import or
> __import__ and Unicode module names (or at least Unicode strings
> describing them). Currently in python 2.5, __import__ appears coerce
> to str, leading to the following error case:
>
> >>> __import__(unicodedata.lookup('GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON'))
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u03b5' in
> position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
>
> With str being the Unicode type in py3k, this branch of the potential
> problem needs to be addressed clearly, whether by defining __import__
> as converting through ASCII, or by defining a useful semantic. If PEP
> 3131 is to be accepted, then it should probably address whether import
> will work on non-ASCII identifiers, and if so what the semantics are
> (if __import__ would otherwise limit to ASCII).
>
> I'm a little worried on the implementation side, because while on
> Windows it should be easy to use unicode file APIs, on Linux the
> filenames may or may be UTF-8 friendly.
>
> Michael
> --
> Michael Urman
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)