Re: [Jython-users] Unicode

[Paul P. <pa...@pr...>]

Finn Bock wrote:
> 
>...
> 
> The single argument unicode() call will use the default encoding. That
> can be changed to something other than "ascii" and then a no-op makes
> less sense:
> 
> [d:\]p22 -S

There is a reason you needed to put in that -S. Changing the default
encoding is not recommended and is not really officially supported. I
would suggest that a higher priority be put on normal uses than on
variant ones. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I have been a strong critic of the
idea that there should be a per-machine changable default encoding.
Obviously enough people agree with me that it hasn't been made a
standard feature yet.

A public sys.setdefaultencoding would be a bad idea because:

 * it is a global variable, with all of the typical scalability problems
that implies. Setting it in one place could break code in some library
module you don't know about.

 * it doesn't work well with a networked world where information coming
off the network could be in random encodings based on other people's
machine encodings

 Paul Prescod