[Python-Dev] Unicode howto in the works - feedback appreciated

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

Hi Skip!

> I began working on a Unicode HOWTO a few weeks ago, got a little ways on it,
> then ignored it until this morning.  I added a little bit more to it then
> decided I should get some feedback.  You can view it at
[...]
> Consider it a start.  Feedback welcome.

Thanks for the initiative!

Something which should probably be added is about this issue:

>>> s = "Marc-André".decode('iso-8859-1')
>>> print s

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

I'm not sure if this is a common issue with other languages. But at
least here (brazilian portuguese), this is a little bit inconvenient.
Fortunately, fixing this is easy, since site.py was nicely prepared
for this (thanks <author> ;-):

if 0:
    # Enable to support locale aware default string encodings.
    import locale
    loc = locale.getdefaultlocale()
    if loc[1]:
        encoding = loc[1]

Enabling it should be enough:

>>> s = "Marc-André".decode('iso-8859-1')
>>> print s
Marc-André

(Marc-André, sorry for taking your name as an example ;-)

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer

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