[Zope] How to convert Zope instance charset?

[Daniel Dekany]

Sunday, April 24, 2005, 6:05:42 PM, Andreas Jung wrote:

>
>
> --On Sonntag, 24. April 2005 17:45 Uhr +0200 Daniel Dekany 
> <ddekany at freemail.hu> wrote:
>
>> Sunday, April 24, 2005, 4:22:10 PM, Andreas Jung wrote:
>> First of all, in this thread I don't care whose mistake it is. My
>> concern is if I can use Zope with UTF-8 (in fact, Plone) in reality or
>> not. Assume that I'm using a few non-US-ASCII characters, and I want
>> sometimes show things alphabetically sorted...
>>
>
> You're not getting the point. As long as you handle with Python string
> and not with unicode strings then there is no way in Zope deal correctly
> with different kind of encodings...As I said...it is an application side
> problem.  Zope and Python provide you the tools to deal with UTF8 but
> you need to solve such problems on in your application.  That's my last
> comment on this issue :-)

Maybe *you* don't get the point. Python has a "virtual machine level"
setting that specifies the locale and encoding (the charset). You can
set it for example like: locale.setlocale('hu_HU', 'ISO-8859-2'). And
although there is no charset information attached to strings,
locale.strcoll and such will assume that the string is in the encoding
specified globally like above, right? All the strings (which is not an
unicode string) is assumed to use that encoding. It seems to me that it
works like that until I specify 'UTF-8' in the locale, in which case it
goes mad.

And, to Max M., regarding patching sequence.sort:

a) There is no guarantee that everything uses for sequence.sort.
   Some code may calls locale.strcoll directly and such, which can
   result in all sort of inconsistency. The fix could be done at
   the root of the problem, which is I belive strcoll.

b) If the problem is in Zope (that I doubt) then it should be patched in
   Zope itself, not by everybody individually. That is, for Andreas
   Jung, if the locale.getlocale(locale.LC_COLLATE) indicates that the
   default charset is UTF-8, then it should be sorted like that. But
   again, I think it should be actually fixed in Python level (in
   locale.strcoll), and not on the Zope level.

Anyway, I have already accepted earlier that while Zope will certainly
work with ISO-8859-2 (that locale.strcoll handles correctly), it will
not work with UTF-8. Hence, Zope doesn't work well with UTF-8, while it
works with "older" charsets (it does without any extra effort, right?).
So I just asked how to switch over ISO-8859-2, and then some start to
tell that it works with UTF-8, and that it should be solved on
application level(!!!)...

> -aj


-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany