Toby Dickenson writes:
... Why isnt a locales sensitive version the default?
That would make it difficult to write reliable portable Python code. I (and probably a high percentage of Python users) am usually uninterested to write portable Python code.
I am *really* interested to write uncluttered code that works in my standard environment (as already noted: almost all in the filesystem and all devices use Latin-1 encoding). Therefore, I want a way to declare to Python what this standard environment is. And I feel these "Unicode conversion errors" really stupid when I interactively work with Python. Authors of modules that should be used internationally are free to set their default encoding to the least common denominator: ASCII. I am able to patch Python to give it back its "setdefaultencoding" should Guido decide to remove it. And I can publish the necessary patch. But, I doubt that we should need such a patch. Dieter