[Python-ideas] Py3 unicode impositions

[Tim Delaney]

On 13 February 2012 16:42, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

> Paul Moore writes:
>

[Lots of stuff from Stephen that I agree with].


>  > And that's even without all this foreign UTF-8 I get from the Unix
>  > guys :-) Apart from the blasted UTF-16, all of it's "ASCII most of
>  > the time".
>
> Indeed.  Do you really see UTF-16 in files that you process with
> Python?


I've only had one real use-case (and it was Java, but could easily be
Python). We wanted to be able to export settings as a CSV file to be opened
in Excel, modified and then re-imported.

Turns out that if you want to open non-ascii CSV files in Excel, they must
be encoded as (IIRC) UTF-16LE (i.e. without a BOM). I think you can save as
other encodings, but that's the only one you can reliably open.

Tim Delaney
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