To unicode or not to unicode

dineshv dineshbvadhia at hotmail.com
Sun Feb 22 08:17:39 EST 2009


re: "You should never have to rely on the default encoding. You should
explicitly decode and encode data."

What is the best practice for 1) doing this in Python and 2) for
unicode support ?

I want to standardize on unicode and want to put into place best
Python practice so that we don't have to worry.  Thanks!

Dinesh



On Feb 19, 7:21 pm, Benjamin Peterson <benja... at python.org> wrote:
> Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon <at> flownet.com> writes:
>
>
>
> > I'm writing a little wiki that I call µWiki.  That's a lowercase Greek
> > mu at the beginning (it's pronounced micro-wiki).  It's working, except
> > that I can't actually enter the name of the wiki into the wiki itself
> > because the default unicode encoding on my Python installation is
> > "ascii".  So I'm trying to decide on a course of action.  There seem to
> > be three possibilities:
>
> You should never have to rely on the default encoding. You should explicitly
> decode and encode data.
>
>
>
> > 1.  Change the code to properly support unicode.  Preliminary
> > investigations indicate that this is going to be a colossal pain in the
> > ass.
>
> Properly handling unicode may be painful at first, but it will surely pay off in
> the future.




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