Guido van Rossum wrote: > And it seems just as wrong if Python doesn't do what the user expects. > If I were a beginning Python user, I'd hate it if I had prepared a > simple data file in vi or notepad and my Python program wouldn't read > it right because Python's idea of encoding differs from my editor's.
As a user, I don't have any expectations regarding non-ASCII text files. I'm using a US-English version of Windows XP (very common) and I haven't changed the default encoding (very common). Python claims that my system encoding is CP436 (from sys.stdin/stdout.encoding). I can assure you that most of the documents that I work with are not in CP436 - they are a combination of ASCII, ISO8859-1, and UTF-8. I would also guess that this is true of many Windows XP (US-English) users. So, for me and users like me, Python is going to silently misinterpret my data. How about using ASCII as the default encoding and raising an exception if non-ASCII text is encountered? Cheers, Brian _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
