[Python-Dev] Re: Multibyte repr()

[Martin v. Loewis]

Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> writes:

>   >>> u = u'\u1f40'
>   >>> s = u.encode('utf8')
>   >>> s
>   'a=\x80'
>   >>>
> 
> The latter output is not helpful, because the encoding of s is not the
> locale's encoding.

[Somehow, the accents got lost in your message]

It isn't helpful, but it isn't strictly wrong, either. In this
specific case, people are used to see utf-8 being interpreted as
Latin-1 - that form of "mojibake" is very common, so they will know
what happened.

I question whether the hex representation is more helpful: it depends
on how you need to interpret the result you get.

Regards,
Martin