Magic UTF-8/Windows-1252 encodings

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 1:28 AM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 29, 2016, at 11:14, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> Please don't. :) This is something that belongs in the application;
>> it's somewhat hacky, and I don't see any benefit to it going into the
>> language. For one thing, I could well imagine making the fallback
>> encoding configurable (it isn't currently, but it could easily be),
>> and that doesn't really fit into the Python notion of error handler.
>
> Well, yeah, if anything implementing it as an error handler is a hack, I
> just meant it's just the least hacky way I can think that fits in the
> size "half a dozen lines".
>
>> For another, this is a fairly rare concept - I don't see dozens of
>> programs out there using the exact same strange logic, and even if
>> there were, there'd be small differences
>
> That is actually an argument in favor of putting it in the stdlib,
> assuming few of those small differences are truly considered and
> intentional. The main thrust of my post was that this is one of the
> things that's harder than it sounds to get right due to edge cases, just
> like the clip/clamp function being discussed last month.

Fair enough. If this were something that a lot of programs wanted,
then yeah, there'd be good value in stdlibbing it. Character encodings
ARE hard to get right, and this kind of thing does warrant some help.
But I think it's best not done in core - at least, not until we see a
lot more people doing the same :)

ChrisA