Removing Unicode from Python?

[Tim Roberts]

Brian Quinlan <brian at sweetapp.com> wrote:

>> All MS products use unicode strings. All the time.  Its integral to
>> the OS and all its libraries.
>
>This statement is obviously false.

Not really.  The core Windows 2000 and XP operating systems are exclusively
Unicode.  When you call one of the ASCII APIs, it converts every string to
Unicode, calls the Unicode API which does the real work, converts any
output parameters back to ASCII, and returns them to you.

As you might imagine, all of those conversions cost time.  Thus,
Microsoft's application products work natively in Unicode and use the
Unicode APIs when they are available.

>But the SQL Server "text" type is not a Unicode type.

And that means, among other things, that it cannot handle international
character sets reasonably.  There is no agreement as to what the character
0xBF is, whereas there IS standards-based agreement on the meaning of the
Unicode code point u00BF.
-- 
- Tim Roberts, timr at probo.com
  Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.