[Zope3-Users] Re: Annoying thing about schema

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Peter Bengtsson wrote:
> Suppose you've written this:
> 
> class ISomething(zope.interface.Interface):
>      foo = zope.schema.TextLine(title="Foo")
> 
> then you get the error below.
> First of all, why can't it just help me and just convert the str to a
> unicode. All it'd need to do is just::
> 
>  title = unicode(title)
> 
> Django does this.
> If someone does something bad like `TextLine(title="Ölmage")` that
> developer should rightly get a UnicodeDecodeError.
> Secondly, if there is an actual reason for this extreme analism, why
> can't the error be wrapped into something more user friendly?

Very good points. I think UnicodeDecodeErrors have a bad reputation, 
though (mostly because of Python's stupid implicit conversion). I think 
Grok's policy is very sane in this regard: wherever human-readable text 
has to be entered, either a unicode object or a string just containing 
ASCII characters are acceptable. A very explicit error message stating 
that exact policy should be raised. Look at Grok's error messages, we've 
tried hard making them understandable.

I think a proposal on zope3-dev (plus a patch) would be welcomed.