Jacob Kaplan-Moss wrote: > "... with too many backwards-incompatible changes ..." -- as Hugo > points out, this will break a lot of existing code. Well, some day Django will have to switch to unicode anyway (even Python-3000 is going to use unicode strings everywhere). Right now is a good time for it. After 1.0 switching will be much more problematic.
> My experience is > that Unicode issues are the worst types of bugs since they only crop > up when dealing with particular data. That's true. But don't you think Django can avoid Unicode-related bugs by not using unicode strings? :) There _are_ bugs alreadly (#924 being a good example). > "... with too little payoff." -- right now it's completely possible > to nicely handle Unicode data in Django as long as you're careful. > Yes, it's not as easy as it might be, but the net result of a Unicode- > ification would be an incremental improvement at best. I'd say handling Unicode data is _quite_ uneasy with current state of things. Instead of, say, s.upper() one has to do unicode(s,DEFAULT_CHARSET).upper().decode(DEFAULT_CHARSET). In other words, currently one has to bother of manually converting strings to Unicode and back for every simple operation. If one forgets about it and just processes raw strings, it is definitely a BUG. It will work for ASCII but not for UTF-8. And sad to say, there are plenty of such bugs, in Django itself and in Django-based software. When using Unicode strings inside Django, such conversion has to be done only on input and output. Moreover, it will be done automatically, without any need to handle it explicitly. So I'm sure that switching to Unicode will not increase the number of those nasty Unicode issues, but will only help to avoid them. > So I think -- for now -- there are more important places to spend our > energy. Unicode awareness may seem not a big issue for English-speakers (for whom plain ASCII is perfectly enough :)), but for others (like me) it's of crucial importance. So if you need my energy for Unicode-ification, it's yours. :) Andrey --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
