[Python-Dev] repr vs. str and locales again

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Ka-Ping Yee wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 19 May 2000, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > The email below suggests a simple solution to a problem that
> > e.g. Fran\347ois Pinard brought up long ago; repr() of a string turns
> > all non-ASCII chars into \oct escapes.  Jyrki's solution: use
> > isprint(), which makes it locale-dependent.  I can live with this.
> 
> Changing the behaviour of repr() (a function that internally
> converts data into data) based on a fixed global system parameter
> makes me uncomfortable.  Wouldn't it make more sense for the
> locale business to be a property of the stream that the string
> is being printed on?

Umm, Jyrki's patch does *not* affect repr(): it's a patch to the
string_print API which is used for the tp_print slot, so the
only effect to be seen is when printing a string to a real
file object (tp_print is only used by PyObject_Print() and that
API is only used for writing to real PyFileObjects -- all
other stream get the output of str() or repr()).

Perhaps we should drop tp_print for strings altogether and
let str() and repr() to decide what to do... (this is
what Unicode objects do). The only good reason for implementing
tp_print is to write huge amounts of data to a stream without
creating intermediate objects -- not really needed for strings,
since these *are* the intermediate object usually created for
just this purpose ;-)

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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