2016-08-20 21:31 GMT+02:00 Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com>: > Reading your summary meant this finally clicked with something Victor > has been considering for a while: a "Force UTF-8" switch that told > Python to ignore the locale encoding on Linux, and instead assume > UTF-8 everywhere (command line parameter parsing, environment variable > processing, filesystem encoding, standard streams, etc) > > It's essentially the same problem you have on Windows, just with > slightly different symptoms and consequences.
Yes and no, but more no than yes :-) On Linux, the issue is quite simple: most major Linux distributions switched to UTF-8 by default, network shares use UTF-8, filenames are stored as UTF-8, applications expect UTF-8, etc. I proposed once a "-X utf8" switch, but more as a convenient workaround for badly configured system which encode data to UTF-8, but the locale encoding is not properly configured *in some cases*. The switch does a single thing: ignore the locale encoding, and force UTF-8 as the locale encoding. Steve's proposition is specific to Windows, and Windows is a different world. On Windows, there is one unique distribution: the Microsoft flavor, and UTF-8 was and is *never* used as the ANSI code page (which is more and less the same thing that UNIX locale encoding). Using UTF-8 is something new, not really common in the Windows world. Steve said that UTF-8 is common in the .NET (but I don't know well Windows community/universe). I proposed to Steve to work on an unified "-X utf8" option to explicitly force UTF-8 on Linux and Windows. But Steve looks to prefer to force UTF-8 *by default*, but add a new option to revert the old behaviour. I proposed the idea, but I'm not sure that we can have a single option for Linux and Windows. Moreover, I never really worked on trying to implement "-X utf8" on Linux, because it looks like the "misconfigured system" are less and less common nowadays. I see very few user requests in this direction. By the way, except Steve, did someone complain about the ANSI code page for bytes on Windows in Python? I recall one or two issues last 5 years about the os.listdir(bytes) issue, but these issues were specific to Python 2 if I recall correctly? Victor _______________________________________________ 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