[Python-Dev] Generalised String Coercion

[Neil Schemenauer]

On Sat, Aug 06, 2005 at 06:56:39PM -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> My first response to the PEP, however, is that instead of a new
> built-in function, I'd rather relax the requirement that str() return
> an 8-bit string -- after all, int() is allowed to return a long, so
> why couldn't str() be allowed to return a Unicode string?

I've played with this idea a bit and it seems viable.  I modified my
original patch to have string_new call PyObject_Text instead of
PyObject_Str.  That change breaks only two tests, both in
test_email.  The tracebacks are attached.  Both problems seem
relatively shallow.  Do you thing such a change could go into 2.5?

  Neil



Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/nas/Python/py_cvs/Lib/email/test/test_email.py", line 2844, in test_encoded_adjacent_nonencoded
    h = make_header(decode_header(s))
  File "/home/nas/Python/py_cvs/Lib/email/Header.py", line 123, in make_header
    charset = Charset(charset)
  File "/home/nas/Python/py_cvs/Lib/email/Charset.py", line 190, in __init__
    input_charset = unicode(input_charset, 'ascii').lower()
TypeError: decoding Unicode is not supported

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/nas/Python/py_cvs/Lib/email/test/test_email.py", line 2750, in test_multilingual
    eq(decode_header(enc),
  File "/home/nas/Python/py_cvs/Lib/email/Header.py", line 85, in decode_header
    dec = email.quopriMIME.header_decode(encoded)
  File "/home/nas/Python/py_cvs/Lib/email/quopriMIME.py", line 319, in header_decode
    return re.sub(r'=\w{2}', _unquote_match, s)
  File "/home/nas/Python/py_cvs/Lib/sre.py", line 142, in sub
    return _compile(pattern, 0).sub(repl, string, count)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xfc in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)