[Python-Dev] Python and the Unicode Character Database

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:58:05 +1000
Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 1:39 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> > I agree that Python should make it easy for the programmer to get
> > numerical values of native numeric strings, but it's not at all clear
> > to me that there is any point to having float() recognize them by
> > default.
> 
> Indeed, as someone else suggested earlier in the thread, supporting
> non-ASCII digits sounds more like a job for the locale module than for
> the builtin types.

Not sure, really. For example, "\d" in a regular expression will match
all Unicode digits, unless you pass the re.ASCII flag. The C locale
mechanism generally does a poor job of supporting what MS seems to call
"culture-specific" characteristics.

Regards

Antoine.