[Python-ideas] Add "htmlcharrefreplace" error handler

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Fri, 14 Jun 2013 13:31:43 +0200
Stefan Drees <stefan at drees.name> wrote:

> On 2013-06-14.06 13:20, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> > On Fri, 14 Jun 2013 07:17:00 -0400
> > Alexander Belopolsky...wrote:
> >> On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 6:11 AM, M.-A. Lemburg ... wrote:
> >>
> >>> I think you are forgetting that the output of such a codec
> >>> is not necessarily always meant for sending over the wire
> >>> to some browser. It may well be used for creating data which
> >>> then has to be manipulated by other tools or humans.
> >>>
> >>
> >> +1
> >>
> >> On top of that, even HTML that is sent over the wire to a browser may end
> >> up being read by a human.  It is for a good reason that every browser has a
> >> view source option more or less readily available.
> >
> > If you want to *read* HTML (not write it), then you certainly want the
> > original Unicode characters, not the garbled HTML entities meant to
> > represent them.
> 
> yes when everything just works and as a consumer, but then as the 
> producers we are  :-) in the midst of a review session a debugging 
> attempt or when seeking a workaround, the view ascii source level of 
> about any platform comes in quite handy ...

Perhaps it does, but that's not a reason to add an error handler to
Python. If you want debug output, you should write your own debug
routines (or, you can simply display the HTML's repr()).

So I still agree with Ezio: the function may be useful as part of the
stdlib, but it doesn't have to be an encoding error handler.

Regards

Antoine.