[Zope] Unicode Error

[Hannu Krosing]

Toby Dickenson kirjutas P, 03.11.2002 kell 01:15:
> On Saturday 02 November 2002 1:48 am, Tino Wildenhain wrote:
> 
> > if encoding != "ascii":
> >     sys.setdefaultencoding(encoding)
> >
> > This implies modification of the installed code to change
> > default behavior. I would consider this as bad.
> > Why isnt a locales sensitive version the default?
> 
> That would make it difficult to write reliable portable Python code. It is a 
> good thing that Python has predictable behaviour for things like 
> (string+integer), a local-sensitive or user-sensitive default encoding would 
> make (plain string+unicode string) unpredictable.

So the default encoding = 'ascii' is there to always force explicit
conversion ?

> Note that nothing else in Python depends on locales by default. Not even date 
> formatting, for example.

Has python finally got a decent standard date module ?

> > However, there is lukyly another way to do it:
> >
> > let us provide a sitecustomize.py module for zope.
> > If its in the path, it has access to sys.setdefaultencoding
> 
> That still breaks Python libraries that assume this has not been changed. 
> 
> This is a legitimate assumption made by these libraries; the same as assuming 
> the behaviour of (string+integer). 

Otoh it is quite weird to have a way to set default encoding that is
inaccessible for users ;(

> > I use it that way (I set utf-8) and Zope unicodes and strings
> > quite good.
> 
> Feel free to do that in your own zope, but this will never be a supported way 
> of using Python. I think it is irresponsible to recommend this approach as if 
> it was standard practice.

sitecustomize.py seems to be the recommended way of overriding the
default charset , so why not recommend it as such?

And UTF-8 as default encoding for unicode should become the supported
way of using Python - computing is becoming universally available to all
people, not just plain-ascii-speaking ones.

-----------------------
Hannu