[Python-3000] Lines breaking

[Alexandre Vassalotti]

On 5/28/07, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> Can you or someone supply a patch? Put it in the SourceForge patch
> manager and post here.

I can't promise anything, since I am quite busy my SoC project, but I
could try to supply a patch, if you and the other developers are in
favor for the change. A few other methods would need to be changed too
to conform fully to the standard -- I am thinking especially of the
file methods readline/readlines. So, the change should probably be
documented in a PEP.

> OTOH I don't believe that's how 2.x implements these methods, and
> AFAIK nobody's complained. Is in necessary to change? At the very
> least I'd be opposed if it changed the behavior of splitting
> ASCII-only text.

The change would extend the line breaking behavior to three other
ASCII characters:
  NEL "Next Line" 85
  VT "Vertical Tab" 0B
  FF "Form Feed" 0C
Of course, it is not really necessary to change, but I think full
conformance to the standard [1] could give Python better support of
multilingual texts. However, full conformance would require a good
amount of work. So, it is true that it is probably better to postpone
it until someone complaint.

-- Alexandre

[1] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/tr14-19.html