[Python-Dev] Allowing Unicode literals even without Unicode support?

[Guido van Rossum]

I implemented code that accepts u"..." literals when Unicode is
disabled, as long as they don't contain \u, \U or \N escapes.  I
didn't implement a test for regular non-ASCII characters.

> 2) Some library modules just don't seem to function without unicode.
> Current bad boys seem to include gettext, urllib (well, this just got
> fixed I think), minidom, pyexpat and the email package.  I could
> imagine the xml modules and the email package just plain not being
> supported w/o unicode.  gettext, too, I guess.

I fixed urllib, and made a fix to the email package so that at least
it won't fail on import.  The test suite still fails though.

> In which case:
> 
> 3) regrtest should probably be taught not to run test_unicode + close
> friends in --disable-unicode builds.
> 
> Anyone feel like digging into any of the above?

As was said before, let whoever cares about this do it.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)