[clug] python unicode question

Martin Pool mbp at sourcefrog.net
Mon Dec 8 11:17:27 GMT 2003


On  8 Dec 2003, Sam Couter <sam at couter.dropbear.id.au> wrote:
> Michael Cohen <michael.cohen at netspeed.com.au> wrote:
> > I dont have any experience with unicode until now but it seems like a big 
> > pain, is there a way to turn all this off, like in perl's export LC_ALL or 
> > somesuch?
> 
> And to go along with Martin's Python-specific comments, here's Joel
> Spolsky's take on Unicode, (not-so) plain text and character sets:
> 
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

I was wondering whether to quote this.  Joel is a bit hit-and-miss,
but this article is OK.

    When I looked closely at the commercial ActiveX control we were
    using to parse MIME email messages, we discovered it was doing
    exactly the wrong thing with character sets, so we actually had to
    write heroic code to undo the wrong conversion it had done and
    redo it correctly. When I looked into another commercial library,
    it, too, had a completely broken character code implementation. I
    corresponded with the developer of that package and he sort of
    thought they "couldn't do anything about it." Like many
    programmers, he just wished it would all blow over somehow.

Ah, the joy of proprietary libraries.

-- 
Martin

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