[Python-ideas] Support WHATWG versions of legacy encodings

[Chris Barker]

On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 9:30 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <
turnbull.stephen.fw at u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:

> In what context?  WHAT-WG's encoding standard is *all about browsers*.
> If a codec is feeding text into a process that renders them all as
> glyphs for a human to look at, that's one thing.  The codec doesn't
> want to fatal there, and the likely fallback glyph is something from
> the control glyphs block if even windows-125x doesn't have a glyph
> there.  I guess it sort of makes sense.
>

sure it does -- and python is not a browser, and python itself has nothigni
visual -- but we sure want to be abel to write code that produces visual
representations of maybe messy text...

if you're feeding a program

...

> the codec has no idea when or how that's
> going to get interpreted.


sure -- which is why others have suggested that if WATWG is supported, then
it *should* only be used for encoding, not encoding. But we are supposed to
be consenting adults here -- I see no reason to prevent encoding -- maybe
it would be useful for testing???

(as with JSON data, which I believe is
> "supposed" to be UTF-8, but many developers use the legacy charsets
> they're used to and which are often embedded in the underlying
> databases etc, ditto XML),


OK -- if developers do the wrong thing, then they do the wrong thing -- we
can't prevent that!

And Python's lovely "text is unicode" model actually makes that hard to do
wong. But we do need a way to decode messy text, and then send it off to
JSON or whatever properly encoded.

-CHB


-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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