[Python-Dev] Re: Python 1.6a2 Unicode bug (was Re: comparing strings and ints)

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Just van Rossum wrote:
> 
> I wrote:
> >A utf-8-encoded 8-bit string in Python is *not* a string, but a "ByteArray".
> 
> Another way of putting this is:
> - utf-8 in an 8-bit string is to a unicode string what a pickle is to an
> object.
> - defaulting to utf-8 upon coercing is like implicitly trying to unpickle
> an 8-bit string when comparing it to an instance. Bad idea.
> 
> Defaulting to Latin-1 is the only logical choice, no matter how
> western-culture-centric this may seem.

Please note that the support for mixing strings and Unicode
objects is really only there to aid porting applications
to Unicode.

New code should use Unicode directly and apply all needed
conversions explicitly using one of the many ways to
encode or decode Unicode data. The auto-conversions are
only there to help out and provide some convenience.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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