On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 07:11:52PM -0500, James Y Knight wrote:
> On Jan 19, 2011, at 6:44 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > This problem of which encoding to use is a problem that can be
> > seen on UNIX systems even now. Try this:
> >
> > echo 'print("hi")' > café.py
> > convmv -f utf-8 -t latin1 café.py
> > python3 -c 'import café'
> >
> > ASCII seems very sensible to me when faced with these ambiguities.
> >
> > Other options I can brainstorm that could be explored:
> >
> > * Specify an encoding per platform and stick to that. (So, for instance,
> > all module names on posix platforms would have to be utf-8). Force
> > translation between encoding when installing packages (But that doesn't
> > help for people that are creating their modules using their own build
> > scripts rather than distutils, copying the files using raw tar, etc.)
> > * Change import semantics to allow specifying the encoding of the module on
> > the filesystem (seems really icky).
>
> None of this is unique to import -- the same exact issue occurs with
> open(u'café'). I don't see any reason why import café should be though of as
> more of a problem, or treated any differently.
>
It's unique in several ways:
1) With open, you can specify a byte string::
open(b'caf\xe9.py').read()
I don't know of any way to do that with import.
This is needed when the filename is not compatible with your current
locale.
2) import assigns a name to the module that it imports whereas open lets the
programmer assign the name. So even if you can specify what to use as
a byte string for this filename on this particular filesystem you'd still
end up with some ugly pseudo-representation of bytes when attempting to
access it in code::
import caf\xe9
caf\xe9.do_something()
-Toshio
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