[Python-ideas] Python 3000 TIOBE -3%

[Yuval Greenfield]

On Feb 13, 2012 10:13 AM, "Paul Moore" <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 13 February 2012 05:12, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> > Paul Moore writes:
> >
> >  > I'm now 100% convinced that
> >  > encoding="ascii",errors="surrogateescape" is the way to say this in
> >  > code.
> >
> > It probably is, for you.  If that ever gives you a UnicodeError, you
> > know how to find out how to deal with it.  And it probably won't.<wink/>
>
> And yet, after your earlier posting on latin-1, and your comments
> here, I'm less certain. Thank you so much :-)
>
> Seriously, I find these discussions about Unicode immensely useful. I
> now have a much better feel for how to deal with (and think about)
> text in "unknown but mostly ASCII" format, which can only be a good
> thing.
>
> > I don't think either argument applies to everybody who needs such a
> > recipe, though.  Many will be best served with encoding='latin-1' by
> > some name.
>
> Probably the key question is, how do we encapsulate this debate in a
> simple form suitable for people to find out about *without* feeling
> like they "have to learn all about Unicode"? A note in the Unicode
> HOWTO seems worthwhile, but how to get people to look there? Given
> that this is people who don't want to delve too deeply into Unicode
> issues.
>
> Just to be clear, my reluctance to "do the right thing" was *not*
> because I didn't want to understand Unicode - far from it, I'm
> interested in, and inclined towards, "doing Unicode right". The
> problem is that I know enough to realise that "proper" handling of
> files where I don't know the encoding, and it seems to be inconsistent
> sometimes (both between files, and even on occasion within a file), is
> a seriously hard issue. And I don't want to get into really hard
> Unicode issues for what, in practical terms, is a simple problem as
> it's one-off code and minor corruption isn't really an issue.
>
> Paul.

Adding a url for help in the exception string that points to a python
unicode faq sounds like a good idea.
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