Paul Boddie wrote: > One side-effect of the "big push" to UTF-8 amongst the Linux > distribution vendors/maintainers is the evasion of issues such as > filesystem encodings and "real" Unicode at the system level. In > Python, when you have a Unicode object, you are dealing with > idealised > sequences of characters, whereas in many system and library APIs out > there you either get back a sequence of anonymous bytes or a sequence > of UTF-8 bytes that people are pretending is Unicode, right up until > the point where someone recompiles the software to use UTF-16 > instead, > thus causing havoc. Anyone who has needed to expose filesystems > created by Linux distributions before the UTF-8 "big push" to later > distributions can attest to the fact that the "see no evil" brass > monkey is wearing a T-shirt with "UTF-8" written on it.
Unfortunately the monkey is painted in the air with a stick, so not everyone can see it. Python can't. Given a random linux system how can you tell if the monkey has pushed it already or not? Serge. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
