On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 4:02 PM, Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benja...@gmail.com>wrote:
> On 23 January 2014 21:51, Chris Barker <chris.bar...@noaa.gov> wrote: > > > > However, I would prefer latin-1 -- that way you might get garbage for > the > > non-ascii parts, but it wouldn't raise an exception and it round-trips > > through encoding/decoding. And you would have a somewhat more useful > subset > > -- including the latin-language character and symbols like the degree > > symbol, etc. > > Exceptions and error messages are a good thing! Garbage is not!!! :) > in principle, I agree with you, but sometime practicality beets purity. in py2 there is a lot of implicit encoding/decoding going on, using the system encoding. That is ascii on a lot of systems. The result is that there is a lot of code out there that folks have ported to use unicode, but missed a few corners. If that code is only testes with ascii, it all seems o be working but then out in the wild someone puts another character in there and presto -- a crash. Also, there are places where the inability to encode makes silent message -- for instance if an Exception is raised with a unicode message, it will get silently dropped when it comes time to display on the terminal. I spent quite a wile banging my head against that one recently when I tried to update some code to read unicode files. I would have been MUCH happier with a bit of garbage in the mesae than having it drop (or raise an encoding error in the middle of the error...) I think this is a bad thing. The advantage of latin-1 is that while you might get something that doesn't print right, it won't crash, and it won't contaminate the data, so comparisons, etc, will still work. kind of like using utf-8 in an old-style c char array -- you can still passi t around and copare it, even if the bytes dont mean what you think they do. -CHB -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception chris.bar...@noaa.gov
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