[Python-Dev] Re: [I18n-sig] ustr

[Toby Dickenson]

On Fri, 07 Jul 2000 07:44:03 -0500, Guido van Rossum
<guido@beopen.com> wrote:

We debated a ustr function in July. Does anyone have this in hand? I
can prepare a patch if necessary.

>> Toby Dickenson wrote:
>> >=20
>> > I'm just nearing the end of getting Zope to play well with unicode
>> > data. Most of the changes involved replacing a call to str, in
>> > situations where either a unicode or narrow string would be
>> > acceptable.
>> >=20
>> > My best alternative is:
>> >=20
>> > def convert_to_something_stringlike(x):
>> >     if type(x)=3D=3Dtype(u''):
>> >         return x
>> >     else:
>> >         return str(x)
>> >=20
>> > This seems like a fundamental operation - would it be worth having
>> > something similar in the standard library?
>
>Marc-Andre Lemburg replied:
>
>> You mean: for Unicode return Unicode and for everything else
>> return strings ?
>>=20
>> It doesn't fit well with the builtins str() and unicode(). I'd
>> say, make this a userland helper.
>
>I think this would be helpful to have in the std library.  Note that
>in JPython, you'd already use str() for this, and in Python 3000 this
>may also be the case.  At some point in the design discussion for the
>current Unicode support we also thought that we wanted str() to do
>this (i.e. allow 8-bit and Unicode string returns), until we realized
>that there were too many places that would be very unhappy if str()
>returned a Unicode string!
>
>The problem is similar to a situation you have with numbers: sometimes
>you want a coercion that converts everything to float except it should
>leave complex numbers complex.  In other words it coerces up to float
>but it never coerces down to float.  Luckily you can write that as
>"x+0.0" while converts int and long to float with the same value while
>leaving complex alone.
>
>For strings there is no compact notation like "+0.0" if you want to
>convert to string or Unicode -- adding "" might work in Perl, but not
>in Python.
>
>I propose ustr(x) with the semantics given by Toby.  Class support (an
>__ustr__ method, with fallbacks on __str__ and __unicode__) would also
>be handy.


Toby Dickenson
tdickenson@geminidataloggers.com