[Python-ideas] PEP 540: Add a new UTF-8 mode

Thu Jan 5 10:38:22 EST 2017

Hi,

Nick Coghlan asked me to review his PEP 538 "Coercing the legacy C
locale to C.UTF-8":
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0538/

Nick wants to change the default behaviour. I'm not sure that I'm
brave enough to follow this direction, so I proposed my old "-X utf8"
command line idea as a new PEP: add a new UTF-8 mode, *disabled by
default*.

These 2 PEPs are the follow-up of the Windows PEP 529 (Change Windows
filesystem encoding to UTF-8) and the issue #19977 (Use
"surrogateescape" error handler for sys.stdin and sys.stdout on UNIX
for the C locale).

The topic (switching to UTF-8 on UNIX) is actively discussed on:
http://bugs.python.org/issue28180

Read the PEP online (HTML):
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0540/

Victor

PEP: 540
Title: Add a new UTF-8 mode
Version: $Revision$
Last-Modified: $Date$
Author: Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com>
Status: Draft
Type: Standards Track
Content-Type: text/x-rst
Created: 5-January-2016
Python-Version: 3.7

Abstract
========

Add a new UTF-8 mode, opt-in option to use UTF-8 for operating system
data instead of the locale encoding. Add ``-X utf8`` command line option
and ``PYTHONUTF8`` environment variable.

Context
=======

Locale and operating system data
--------------------------------

Python uses the ``LC_CTYPE`` locale to decide how to encode and decode
data from/to the operating system:

* file content
* command line arguments: ``sys.argv``
* standard streams: ``sys.stdin``, ``sys.stdout``, ``sys.stderr``
* environment variables: ``os.environ``
* filenames: ``os.listdir(str)`` for example
* pipes: ``subprocess.Popen`` using ``subprocess.PIPE`` for example
* error messages
* name of a timezone
* user name, terminal name: ``os``, ``grp`` and ``pwd`` modules
* host name, UNIX socket path: see the ``socket`` module
* etc.

At startup, Python calls ``setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "")`` to use the user
``LC_CTYPE`` locale and then store the locale encoding,
``sys.getfilesystemencoding()``. In the whole lifetime of a Python process,
the same encoding and error handler are used to encode and decode data
from/to the operating system.

.. note::
   In some corner case, the *current* ``LC_CTYPE`` locale must be used
   instead of ``sys.getfilesystemencoding()``. For example, the ``time``
   module uses the *current* ``LC_CTYPE`` locale to decode timezone
   names.

The POSIX locale and its encoding
---------------------------------

The following environment variables are used to configure the locale, in
this preference order:

* ``LC_ALL``, most important variable
* ``LC_CTYPE``
* ``LANG``

The POSIX locale,also known as "the C locale", is used:

* if the first set variable is set to ``"C"``
* if all these variables are unset, for example when a program is
  started in an empty environment.

The encoding of the POSIX locale must be ASCII or a superset of ASCII.

On Linux, the POSIX locale uses the ASCII encoding.

On FreeBSD and Solaris, ``nl_langinfo(CODESET)`` announces an alias of
the ASCII encoding, whereas ``mbstowcs()`` and ``wcstombs()`` functions
use the ISO 8859-1 encoding (Latin1) in practice. The problem is that
``os.fsencode()`` and ``os.fsdecode()`` use
``locale.getpreferredencoding()`` codec. For example, if command line
arguments are decoded by ``mbstowcs()`` and encoded back by
``os.fsencode()``, an ``UnicodeEncodeError`` exception is raised instead
of retrieving the original byte string.

To fix this issue, Python now checks since Python 3.4 if ``mbstowcs()``
really uses the ASCII encoding if the the ``LC_CTYPE`` uses the the
POSIX locale and ``nl_langinfo(CODESET)`` returns ``"ASCII"`` (or an
alias to ASCII). If not (the effective encoding is not ASCII), Python
uses its own ASCII codec instead of using ``mbstowcs()`` and
``wcstombs()`` functions for operating system data.

See the `POSIX locale (2016 Edition)
<http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap07.html>`_.

C.UTF-8 and C.utf8 locales
--------------------------

Some operating systems provide a variant of the POSIX locale using the
UTF-8 encoding:

* Fedora 25: ``"C.utf8"`` or ``"C.UTF-8"``
* Debian (eglibc 2.13-1, 2011): ``"C.UTF-8"``
* HP-UX: ``"C.utf8"``

It was proposed to add a ``C.UTF-8`` locale to glibc: `glibc C.UTF-8
proposal <https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Proposals/C.UTF-8>`_.

Popularity of the UTF-8 encoding
--------------------------------

Python 3 uses UTF-8 by default for Python source files.

On Mac OS X, Windows and Android, Python always use UTF-8 for operating
system data instead of the locale encoding. For Windows, see the `PEP
529: Change Windows filesystem encoding to UTF-8
<https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0529/>`_.

On Linux, UTF-8 became the defacto standard encoding by default,
replacing legacy encodings like ISO 8859-1 or ShiftJIS. For example,
using different encodings for filenames and standard streams is likely
to create mojibake, so UTF-8 is now used *everywhere*.

The UTF-8 encoding is the default encoding of XML and JSON file format.
In January 2017, UTF-8 was used in `more than 88% of web pages
<https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/en-utf8/all/all>`_ (HTML,
Javascript, CSS, etc.).

See `utf8everywhere.org <http://utf8everywhere.org/>`_ for more general
information on the UTF-8 codec.

.. note::
   Some applications and operating systems (especially Windows) use Byte
   Order Markers (BOM) to indicate the used Unicode encoding: UTF-7,
   UTF-8, UTF-16-LE, etc. BOM are not well supported and rarely used in
   Python.

Old data stored in different encodings and surrogateescape
----------------------------------------------------------

Even if UTF-8 became the defacto standard, there are still systems in
the wild which don't use UTF-8. And there are a lot of data stored in
different encodings. For example, an old USB key using the ext3
filesystem with filenames encoded to ISO 8859-1.

The Linux kernel and the libc don't decode filenames: a filename is used
as a raw array of bytes. The common solution to support any filename is
to store filenames as bytes and don't try to decode them. When displayed to
stdout, mojibake is displayed if the filename and the terminal don't use
the same encoding.

Python 3 promotes Unicode everywhere including filenames. A solution to
support filenames not decodable from the locale encoding was found: the
``surrogateescape`` error handler (`PEP 393
<https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0393/>`_), store undecodable bytes
as surrogate characters. This error handler is used by default for
operating system data, by ``os.fsdecode()`` and ``os.fsencode()`` for
example (except on Windows which uses the ``strict`` error handler).

Standard streams
----------------

Python uses the locale encoding for standard streams: stdin, stdout and
stderr. The ``strict`` error handler is used by stdin and stdout to
prevent mojibake.

The ``backslashreplace`` error handler is used by stderr to avoid
Unicode encode error when displaying non-ASCII text. It is especially
useful when the POSIX locale is used, because this locale usually uses
the ASCII encoding.

The problem is that operating system data like filenames are decoded
using the ``surrogateescape`` error handler (PEP 393). Displaying a
filename to stdout raises an Unicode encode error if the filename
contains an undecoded byte stored as a surrogate character.

Python 3.6 now uses ``surrogateescape`` for stdin and stdout if the
POSIX locale is used: `issue #19977 <http://bugs.python.org/issue19977>`_. The
idea is to passthrough operating system data even if it means mojibake, because
most UNIX applications work like that. Most UNIX applications store filenames
as bytes, usually simply because bytes are first-citizen class in the used
programming language, whereas Unicode is badly supported.

.. note::
   The encoding and/or the error handler of standard streams can be
   overriden with the ``PYTHONIOENCODING`` environment variable.

Proposal
========

Add a new UTF-8 mode, opt-in option to use UTF-8 for operating system data
instead of the locale encoding:

* Add ``-X utf8`` command line option
* Add ``PYTHONUTF8=1`` environment variable

Add also a strict UTF-8 mode, enabled by ``-X utf8=strict`` or
``PYTHONUTF8=strict``.

The UTF-8 mode changes the default encoding and error handler used by
open(), os.fsdecode(), os.fsencode(), sys.stdin, sys.stdout and
sys.stderr:

============================  =======================
=======================  ======================
======================
Function                      Default, other locales   Default, POSIX
locale    UTF-8                   UTF-8 Strict
============================  =======================
=======================  ======================
======================
open()                        locale/strict            locale/strict
         UTF-8/surrogateescape   UTF-8/strict
os.fsdecode(), os.fsencode()  locale/surrogateescape
locale/surrogateescape   UTF-8/surrogateescape   UTF-8/strict
sys.stdin                     locale/strict
locale/surrogateescape   UTF-8/surrogateescape   UTF-8/strict
sys.stdout                    locale/strict
locale/surrogateescape   UTF-8/surrogateescape   UTF-8/strict
sys.stderr                    locale/backslashreplace
locale/backslashreplace  UTF-8/backslashreplace
UTF-8/backslashreplace
============================  =======================
=======================  ======================
======================

The UTF-8 mode is disabled by default to keep hard Unicode errors when
encoding or decoding operating system data failed, and to keep the
backward compatibility. The user is responsible to enable explicitly the
UTF-8 mode, and so is better prepared for mojibake than if the UTF-8
mode would be enabled *by default*.

The UTF-8 mode should be used on systems known to be configured with
UTF-8 where most applications speak UTF-8. It prevents Unicode errors if
the user overrides a locale *by mistake* or if a Python program is
started with no locale configured (and so with the POSIX locale).

Most UNIX applications handle operating system data as bytes, so
``LC_ALL``, ``LC_CTYPE`` and ``LANG`` environment variables have a
limited impact on how these data are handled by the application.

The Python UTF-8 mode should help to make Python more interoperable with
the  other UNIX applications in the system assuming that *UTF-8* is used
everywhere and that users *expect* UTF-8.

Ignoring ``LC_ALL``, ``LC_CTYPE`` and ``LANG`` environment variables in
Python is more convenient, since they are more commonly misconfigured
*by mistake* (configured to use an encoding different than UTF-8,
whereas the system uses UTF-8), rather than being misconfigured by intent.

Backward Compatibility
======================

Since the UTF-8 mode is disabled by default, it has no impact on the
backward compatibility. The new UTF-8 mode must be enabled explicitly.

Alternatives
============

Always use UTF-8
----------------

Python already always use the UTF-8 encoding on Mac OS X, Android and Windows.
Since UTF-8 became the defacto encoding, it makes sense to always use it on all
platforms with any locale.

The risk is to introduce mojibake if the locale uses a different encoding,
especially for locales other than the POSIX locale.

Force UTF-8 for the POSIX locale
--------------------------------

An alternative to always using UTF-8 in any case is to only use UTF-8 when the
``LC_CTYPE`` locale is the POSIX locale.

The `PEP 538: Coercing the legacy C locale to C.UTF-8
<https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0538/>`_ of  Nick Coghlan proposes to
implement that using the ``C.UTF-8`` locale.

Related Work
============

Perl has a ``-C`` command line option and a ``PERLUNICODE`` environment
varaible to force UTF-8: see `perlrun
<http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun.html>`_. It is possible to configure
UTF-8 per standard stream, on input and output streams, etc.

Copyright
=========

This document has been placed in the public domain.