Roy Smith wrote:
What I can't find an explanation for is why str.join() doesn't automatically call str() on its arguments, so that e.g. str.join([1,2,4,5]) would yield "1245", and ditto for e.g. user-defined classes that have a __str__() defined.
That would be the wrong thing to do when the arguments are unicodes.
Why would it be wrong? I ask this with honest naivete, being quite ignorant of unicode issues.
As someone else demonstrated earlier...
>>> str(u'ü') Traceback (most recent call last): File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ? UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128) >>>
Using str() on a unicode object works... IF all of the unicode characters are also in the ASCII charset. But if you're using non-ASCII unicode characters (and there's no point to using Unicode unless you are, or might be), then str() will throw an exception.
The Effbot mentioned a join() implementation that would be smart enough to do the right thing in this case, but it's not as simple as just implicitly calling str().
Jeff Shannon Technician/Programmer Credit International
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