[Python-Dev] Removing the implicit str() call from printing API

[Andy Robinson]

> So far, noone has commented on this idea.
>
> I would like to go ahead and check in patch which passes through
> Unicode objects to the file-object's .write() method while leaving
> the standard str() call for all other objects in place.
>
I'm behind this in principle.  Here's an example of why:

>>> tokyo_utf8 = "??"   # the kanji for Tokyo, trust me...
>>> print tokyo_utf8   # this is 8-bit and prints fine
東京
>>> tokyo_uni = codecs.utf_8_decode(tokyo_utf8)[0]
>>> print tokyo_uni    # try to print the kanji
Traceback (innermost last):
  File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)
>>>

Let's say I am generating HTML pages and working with
Unicode strings containing data > 127.  It is far more
natural to write a lot of print statements than to
have to (a) concatenate all my strings or (b)
do this on every line that prints something:

   print tokyo_utf8.encode(my_encoding)

We could trivially make a file object which knows to
convert the output to, say, Shift-JIS, or even
redirect sys.stdout to such an object.  Then we
could just print Unicode strings to it.  Effectively,
the decision on whether a string is printable is deferred
to the printing device.  I think this is a good
pattern which encourages people to work in Unicode.

I know nothing of the Python internals and cannot
help weigh up how serious the breakage is, but it
would be a logical feature to add.

- Andy Robinson