What happened with python? messed strings?

[Jason Scheirer]

On Apr 20, 11:54 am, <alg... at droog.sdf-eu.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> I used extensively python and now I find this mess with strings,
> I can't even reproduce tutorial examples:>>> "apfel".encode('utf-8')  (it was with umlaut)
>
>   File "<stdin>", line 0
>
>     ^
> SyntaxError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc4 in position 1:
> ordinal not in range(128)

Two things: Mark the character encoding of your file ( read
http://www.python.org/doc/2.3/whatsnew/section-encodings.html ), and
then if that doesn't work try to .decode('something') your string
first with the appropriate codec, then you get a unicode object for
free and you don't need the .encode('utf-8'). Also read the slides at
http://farmdev.com/talks/unicode/ for some good information about
unicode in Python.

>
> Is there any good guide to this mess of codecs and hell ?
>
> python should have stayed at version 1.5, every single 'improvement'
> has been a mess. But this is the definitive hell.

It's true -- decorators, the class/type cleanup, properties, -= and
+=, list comprehensions, generators, distutils, and all the new
modules in the standard library are completely, entirely useless.
Python SHOULD have stayed at 1.5.

>
> thanks!
>
> --
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