> Does Unix even support UTF-16 as an encoding? I suppose, these days, it > probably does, for reading contents of files created on Windows, etc.
I don't think Unix supports any encodings at all for the _contents_ of files -- that's up to applications. Of course the command line text processing tools need to know -- I'm guessing those are never going to work w/UTF-16! "System encoding" is a nice idea, but pretty much worthless. Only helpful for files created and processed on the same system -- not rare for that not to be the case. This brings up the other key problem. If file names are (almost) arbitrary bytes, how do you write one to/read one from a text file with a particular encoding? ( or for that matter display it on a terminal) And people still want to say posix isn't broken in this regard? Sigh. -Chris _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com